Steve Aylett Quotes

A hundred percent of marriages end in divorce, disappearance or death.

A sniper is like a genius - it’s not enough to be one, you have to be one at something.

One thing you’ll say for skeletons, they’ll always give you a smile.

Scientists used to do an experiment whereby a dog's repeated reward for performing a task was unaccountably replaced by punishment. The dog, knowing it would be penalized for doing well or doing badly, would become melancholic and inactive. This and other unforeseeable results were funded by taxing up to sixty percent of people's earnings. People became strangely melancholic and inactive

The optimist sees the future as a rabbit sees the oncoming truck - getting bigger, not closer.

In America, fundamentalist Christians believe the world was created 6,000 years ago - in England people drink in bars that are older than that.

What’s life in this nation? Collect emptiness in a household of cornflakes. Transient fuel gobbles attention, the television aches, the truth walks. Scheme worms welcome your corpse, trap clicks and you’re in heaven, bored rigid

Biting enemies seems to be acceptable in a surprisingly narrow range of circumstances, or so a ninja shouted at me once

He has been positively growing tusks trying to create a breed of human insect which will continue to live on this accursed planet. Everyone needs a goal.

We have truth in order not to die of art.

Dreams always end before you kill the last person.

Satire works in a bunch of specific ways, like a very precisely-geared bomb. It's a bit like something that looks harmless, and you swallow it, but once it's inside you it's too late, and it triggers, blowing up. And it's your specific inner beliefs and faulty arguments that trigger a satire bomb. If your arguments work, the bomb doesn't trigger, it doesn't need to.

Fractal litigation, whereby the flapping of a butterfly’s wings on one side of the world resulted in a massive compensation claim on the other.

Sanity’s a virginity of the mind

Honesty is the voice that is acceptable in every matter.

The great thing about being ignored is that you can speak the truth with impunity.

The most amusing thing about a pantomime horse is the necessity of having to shoot it twice.

Originality irritates so obscurely that people may have to evolve to scratch it.

Gun stripping is the tea ceremony of America.

In books there's nothing of the fish covered in the coldness of the sea, or the feeling of a star touching space. Bad for business.

Ideas are self-replenishing, like snot

Most books are so well written they barely have any effect on the reader's senses

What happens when the hitcher and the driver are equally murderous?

I knew books could see people around them, they ground their tiny teeth, tried to rattle like windows, stories to tell.

Hang up the phone on a vampire, the definition of carefree.

How many times does a man have to shave before his chin gets the message?

One golfer a year is hit by lightning. This may be the only evidence we have of God's existence.

The best way of getting into something is to think of it as mischief.

From space this Earth is incandescent with abominations - the gods write their signature in our entrails

The law is where reality goes to die.

A society will manufacture an image of progress and locate it in the direction it wishes to take us.

An office is a machine for dying.

Let us forget the past - this is the only way to be genuinely surprised.

It’s a shame, sort of a waste, that most people are influenced by what the newspaper supplements tell them is the book they are meant to be seen reading this year. It seems like those people aren’t really interested in books. If you’re really into books, you havoc all over the place picking up disparate stuff which you devour hungrily, and the ‘selection’ process is more like a sixth sense hunger, a billion miles away from fashion.

Since childhood I’d been suspected of imagination

Stab me if you can enjoy it - but not if it feels like a duty. Stab me vertically if I'm lying down and horizontally if I'm running

A key and a strangler - this is all a simple tale requires.