BRIAN ALDISS

It is comparatively easy to become a writer; staying a writer, resisting formulaic work, generating one's own creativity - that's a much tougher matter.

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

When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults.

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

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.

Science fiction is no more written for scientists that ghost stories are written for ghosts.

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.

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

Keep violence in the mind where it belongs.

Its at night, when perhaps we should be dreaming, that the mind is most clear, that we are most able to hold all our life in the palm of our skull. I dont know if anyone has ever pointed out that great attraction of insomnia before, but it is so; the night seems to release a little more of our vast backward inheritance of instincts and feelings; as with the dawn, a little honey is allowed to ooze between the lips of the sandwich, a little of the stuff of dreams to drip into the waking mind.

We belong to an age where apocalypse is our daily bread, coffee's black, and we know we're part of the abyss. Red Spider White Web is right on target in conveying that understanding. It splinters in the mind... the underworld of the century's imaginings.

Let's have a toast - to the future generation of consumers, however many heads or assholes they have!

Keep violence in the mind Where it belongs (Barefoot in the Head)

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

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.

Relax, enjoy yourself. Have another drink. It's patriotic to overconsume.

The day of the android has dawned.

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.

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.

That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay.

Science fiction is the search for a definition of mankind and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post Gothic mode.

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

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

Science fiction is for real, space opera is for fun.

All over the world there must be far-reaching changes in animal behavior and habitat; if only one could have another life in which to chart it all... Ah, well, that's not a fruitful thing to wish, is it?