Brian Aldiss Quotes

I was born in 1949, and by the time I was 10, I figured out that my hope chest was not aimed in the same direction everybody else's was. And that life was going to be very, very complicated. And that I could either be provocative and declamatory, or shy, retiring and scared.

I turned to punk because I didn't fit in anywhere else.

I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.

I wasn't interested in going to the school dances. I wasn't interested in going to the football games. What I wanted was to be in my room painting my walls and doing weird stuff. That's what I wanted and I got to do what I wanted, so that, to me, is my high school experience.

To me, punk rock is the freedom to create, freedom to be successful, freedom to not be successful, freedom to be who you are. It's freedom.

Songs don't have to be about going out on Saturday night and having a good rink-up and driving home and crashing cars. A lot of what I've done is about alienation... about where you fit in society.

I like the struggles that people have, people who are feeling like they don't fit into society, because I still sort of feel that way.

I realized I'm not the kind of person who wants to go with the flow and fit in. I'm an agitator, I'm opinionated, I'm a libertine and leader.

I wore ripped jeans and headbands before people wore that. I've been this guy ever since.

The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.

In the U.S., you have to be a deviant or die of boredom.

I don't care much about conforming.

If I want to put on a pair of Converse with a pencil stuck through them, I will.

The inner me was always under attack by authority, by the way my parents wanted me to be brought up, by these English schools I went to. So I've always felt this kind of anti-authoritarian strain in me, pushing to express itself despite the obstacles.

I don't function well in certain aspects of society, and you can read into that what you will.

I'm going to do everything I can to keep from being mainstream.

I've always been interested in the outsider.

I think being different, going against the grain of society is the greatest thing in the world.

The American people ... have a stake in con-conformity, for they know that the American genius is non-conformist.

I'm somebody who doesn't believe in conforming to maybe whatever is on the radio.

The punk era, at its best, celebrated questioning the norm and the promotion of originality. Both concepts have always resonated with me.

I was always interested in the fringes of culture and society and in expressing myself in a distinctively different way, like always rooting for the underdog, that kind of thing.

I am not a conformist.

I have an interest in the outsider.

There are certain societal laws that are just accepted, things that are arbitrary. I think the fun thing about psychotics is that they question that. It can be very freeing... like, my ego or my individuality trumps society's law.