Top 40 Brian W. Aldiss Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Science fiction is for real, space opera is for fun.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

Featured in: Fun Quotes

2. “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.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

3. “It’s a national failing to think of politics as something that goes on in Parliament. It isn’t; it’s something that goes on inside us.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

4. “Relax, enjoy yourself. Have another drink. It’s patriotic to overconsume.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

5. “My briefest ever definition of science fiction is ‘Hubris clobbered by Nemesis.’”

— Brian W. Aldiss

6. “Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

7. “There are two kinds of writer: those that make you think, and those that make you wonder.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

8. “Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

9. “The misfortune of a young man who returns to his native land after years away is that he finds his native land foreign; whereas the lands he left behind remain for ever like a mirage in his mind. However, misfortune can itself sow seeds of creativity. – – Afterword to “Hothouse” Brian Aldiss.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

10. “The prose poem Walk The Red Road is great stuff and deserves to be read aloud. It compares quite favorably to The Walls Of Emerald by Li Chiang Yen, a Chinese poet of the late Tang period.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

11. “Evil is loose in the world. I have to go.” “I don’t believe in evil. Mistakes, yes. Not evil.” “Then perhaps you are afraid to believe it exists. It exists wherever men are. It.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

12. “Most of my poetry lies beyond the SF field, yet here I am corralled into ‘SF poetry’ as part of this poetry weekend. Of course, some might say, ‘you’ve made your own bed – now you must lie in it!’ But, while fully accepting that dictum, I’m not yet quite prepared to lie down...”

— Brian W. Aldiss

13. “An overcrowded world is the ideal place in which to be lonely.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

14. “However you envisage your role in life, all you can do is perform it as best you can.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

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

— Brian W. Aldiss

16. “Fantasy is literature for teenagers.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

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

— Brian W. Aldiss

18. “Most SF is about madness, or what is currently ruled to be madness; this is part of its attraction – it’s always playing with how much the human mind can encompass.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

19. “Obeying an inalienable law, things grew, growing riotous and strange in their impulse for growth.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

20. “Life on the big slope was endurable, and sometimes more than just endurable, for the human spirit was a genius for making mountains out of molehills of happiness.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

21. “The day of the android has dawned.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

22. “The shuffle only demonstrated people’s fatuous belief in a political cure for a human condition.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

23. “I feel happy or sad. I love people. Therefore I am human. Isn’t that so?”

— Brian W. Aldiss

24. “Why had I become a writer in the first place? Because I wasn’t fit for society; I didn’t fit into the system.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

25. “Man was an accident on this world or it would have been made better for him!”

— Brian W. Aldiss

26. “To read is to strike a blow for culture.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

27. “I am a writer and always was; being a writer is an integral part of my identity. Being published, being well regarded, is a component of that identity.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

28. “I have had wealth, rank and power, but, if these were all I had, how wretched I should be.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

29. “When knowledge becomes formulated into a science, then it does take on a life of it’s own, often alien to the human spirit that conceived it.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

30. “The feat represents immense achievement for the neotenic ape, species Homo sapiens. But behind this lie twooldattributesoftheapetribalismandinquisitiveness.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

31. “This shall be home, where danger was my cradle, and all we have learned will guard us!”

— Brian W. Aldiss

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

— Brian W. Aldiss

33. “I was hardly fit for human society. Thus destiny shaped me to be a science fiction writer.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

34. “It is comparatively easy to become a writer; staying a writer, resisting formulaic work, generating ones own creativity – thats a much tougher matter.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

35. “Feedback is a pleasant thing. I get a lot of letters from unexpected people in unexpected places.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

36. “If more people had put their fellow human beings before abstractions last century, we shouldn’t be where we are now.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

37. “What were several fewer species of animals compared with a hundred-mile advance and another medal on another general?”

— Brian W. Aldiss

38. “It’s a funny thing in my job: you remain perpetually lonely in a world where loneliness is the rarest commodity.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

39. “I love you and I feel sad just like real people, so I must be human... Mustn’t I?”

— Brian W. Aldiss

40. “Violence was regarded as an acceptable solution to many problems which would never have originated had violence not been in the air in the first place.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

41. “On Mars, Venus, Mercury, and the moons of Jupiter, human beings were more free – free to found their own petty nations and ruin their own lives their own way. But.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

42. “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.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

43. “It occurred to him that perhaps all his life he had only been hearing echoes of himself, and that his morality, on which he had once prided himself, was merely a refusal to permit other people into his life.”

— Brian W. Aldiss

44. “Laintal Ay, you also have an inwardness to your nature. I feel it. That inwardness will distress you, yet it gives you life, it is life.”

— Brian W. Aldiss