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Brian Aldiss Quotes

1925–2017 England

Brian Wilson Aldiss (August 18, 1925 – August 19, 2017) was an English writer of general fiction and science fiction.

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Also known as: Aldiss, Brian, Aldiss, Brian Wilson

Random Brian Aldiss quote

93 quotes

Why should you be confused just because you come from a confused civilization?

Who Can Replace a Man? (1965)

If adolescence did not exist it would be unnecessary to invent it!

Who Can Replace a Man? (1965)

I’ve no objection to morality, except that it’s obsolete.

Greybeard (1964)

There has always been a belief in miracles in the popular mind. As L. Sprague de Camp once said, the public would rather be bunked than debunked.

I kill from conviction, not to pass a personality quiz.

Who Can Replace a Man? (1965)

What would be the effect of gradually drawing away from the iron laws under which, since its scampering pleistocene infancy, humankind had lived?

Who Can Replace a Man? (1965)

As Flitch dryly remarked when Greybeard commented on the graveyard, “Ah, they keep a-planting of ’em, but there ain’t any more of ’em growing up.”

Greybeard (1964)

Carnage added to carnage does not equal peace.

Who Can Replace a Man? (1965)

The ability to change should not be despised.

Who Can Replace a Man? (1965)

The quest for pattern is a basic instinct.

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.

Aldiss’s second law of thermo-linguistics states that what is most popular is rarely best and that what is best is rarely most popular.

Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem.

Digging deep in a Martian desert
men discovered an enormous brain.
It suddenly started to think at them —
So they covered it up again...

To be a standard shape is not all in life. To know is also important.

Hothouse (1962)

What we do not know is what became of the Korlevalulaw. They must have reigned so long, they must have been so invincible to all but Time.

Obeying an inalienable law, things grew, spreading riotous and strange in their instinct for growth.

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.

One of the characteristics of age was that all avenues of talk led backward in time.

Greybeard (1964)

“The intelligent have been overwhelmed by the dull. Is that not an invasion?”
“More, I would say, of a self-betrayal.”

Who Can Replace a Man? (1965)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Brian Aldiss (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.