Brian Aldiss Quotes

74 Sourced Quotes

The bombs were only
In his head
On his memorial tree
A joker wrote
KEEP VIOLENCE IN THE MIND
WHERE IT BELONGS

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

Brian Aldiss
Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts.

Brian Aldiss
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 Aldiss
One afternoon in early January, the weather showed a lack of character. There was no frost nor wind: the trees in the garden did not stir.

Brian Aldiss
Frank's chromosome was now breeding as true as ever. Blood group, creed, colour of skin — nothing was proof against it. The numbers with shared consciousness, procreating for all they were worth, trebled every generation.

Brian Aldiss
The directors of Synthank were eating an enormous luncheon to celebrate the launching of their new product. Some of them wore the plastic face-masks popular at the time. All were elegantly slender, despite the rich food and drink they were putting away. Their wives were elegantly slender, despite the food and drink they too were putting away. An earlier and less sophisticated generation would have regarded them as beautiful people, apart from their eyes.

Brian Aldiss
An overcrowded world is the ideal place in which to be lonely.

Brian Aldiss
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 Aldiss
My wife Margaret and I sold our house to Sir Roger Penrose and his wife... Talking to Roger, I found we both agreed that AI, as they call it, is not going to be achieved by present-day machines."Artificial Intelligence" — that makes it sound simple, but what you're really talking about is artificial consciousness, AC. And I don't think there's any way we can achieve artificial consciousness, at least until we've understood the sources of our own consciousness. I believe consciousness is a mind/body creation, literally interwoven with the body and the body's support systems. Well, you don't get that sort of thing with a robot.

Brian Aldiss
Full of years, Sir Frank's body died. The diphtheria which carried him off caused him as much suffering as it would have done an ordinary man; dying was not eased by his unique gift. He slid out into the long darkness — but his consciousness continued unabated in eight other bodies.

Brian Aldiss
One of the objections I have against Campbell's Astounding was that there was too little love in it. It was a very loveless magazine. They never took enough account of the feeling that is always in SF.

Brian Aldiss
When you are young, you enjoy a sustained illusion that sooner or later something marvelous is going to happen, that you are going to transcend your parents' limitations.

Brian Aldiss
Are you a religious man, Joe?
Flitch pulled a face. I leaves that sort of thing to women.

Brian Aldiss
Jagger had gone through there. Harley also went through. Somewhere he did not know, somewhere whose existence he had not guessed.… Somewhere that wasn't the house.…

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

Brian Aldiss
What were several fewer species of animals compared with a hundred-mile advance and another medal on another general?

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

Brian Aldiss
The ambition of the original Frank had not died; it had grown subtler. It had become a wish to sample everything. The more bodily habitations there were with which to sample, the more tantalizing the idea seemed: for many experiences, belonging only to one brief era, are never repeated, and may be gone before they are perceived and tasted.

Brian Aldiss
Many Franks of the sixteenth generation were killed in the muck of the trenches, he died not once but many times, developing an obsessive dread of war which never left him.
By the time the Americans entered the war, he was turning his many thoughts to politics.

Brian Aldiss
They came, by what means he did not know, from outside, the vast abstraction that none of them had ever seen. He had a mental picture of a starry void in which men and monsters swam or battled, and then swiftly erased it. Such ideas did not conform with the quiet behavior of his companions; if they never spoke about outside, did they think about it?

Brian Aldiss
In the extraordinary ancestral compost heap of your unconscious mind, I have burrowed too long.

Brian Aldiss
All of which pointed to a moral that they should have learned long before, Arthur thought: Never trust a bunch of lousy politicians to do your thinking for you.

Brian Aldiss
If more people had put their fellow human beings before abstractions last century, we shouldn't be where we are now.

Brian Aldiss
The thing was not discussable, even with a near acquaintance like Calvin because … because of the nature of the thing … because one had to behave like a normal, unworried human being. That at least was sound and clear and gave him comfort: behave like a normal human being.

Brian Aldiss