Brian Wilson Aldiss, OBE (August 18, 1925 - August 19, 2017) was an English writer and anthologies editor, best known for science fiction novels and short stories. Greatly influenced by science fiction pioneer H.G. Wells, his influential works include the short tory "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long", the basis for the Stanley Kubrick-developed Steven Spielberg film, A.I. Artificial Intelligence. (Click for full Wikipedia article.) This post was originally written while Aldiss was alive and was modified to reflect his death.
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An overcrowded world is the ideal place in which to be lonely.
Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.
However you envisage your role in life, all you can do is perform it as best you can.
I can't help believing that these things that come from the subconscious mind have a sort of truth to them. It may not be a scientific truth, but it's psychological truth.
I was hardly fit for human society. Thus destiny shaped me to be a science fiction writer.
I've no objection to morality, except that it's obsolete.
If more people had put their fellow human beings before abstractions last century, we shouldn't be where we are now.
Keep violence in the mind where it belongs.
Let's have a toast- to the future generation of consumers, however many heads or assholes they have!
Man was an accident on this world or it would have been made better for him!
Obeying an inalienable law, things grew, growing riotous and strange in their impulse for growth.
One of the characteristics of age was that all avenues of talk led backward in time.
Plato would have no actors in his republic, in case pretense devoured what was real. Plato's fears have proved well-grounded.
Relax, enjoy yourself. Have another drink. It's patriotic to overconsume.
Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts.
To be a standard shape is not all in life. To know is also important.
We have built illusions round us and see no way out of the glass forest.
Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem.
Whatever terrific events may inform our lives, it always comes to that in the end; we just want to lie down.
When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay.
Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name.
Once land gets in a state, once it begins to deteriorate, it is hard to reverse the process. Land falls sick just like people—that's the whole tragedy of our time.
Fantasy is literature for teenagers.
Categories: Brian Aldiss, Quotes of the day
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