YouSaid · the spoken record

Brian Aldiss

lines on the record: 39
first: 2007-01-28
most recent: 2007-01-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I've thought very hard about this for at least a minute, and then I thought the answer must be Walter Brown singing all rulers,'cause, you know, it encapsulates a lot of my life too.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I would take John Halpens' recent biography of John Osborne, a new John Osborne, and I could see the awful mess that his life was in. based on a kind of loss, and how funny he was, how creative, what a good drinker he was, and how perfectly Halpen has understood him. So it's more than a biography. It's a philosophy.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When my last record comes from Hulth's planet suite, it's a record that I've long loved, and finally I've realised the whole gravity of the situation. It's a Saturn, the bringer of old age.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I'm not. I have a very happy and loving and exhilarating and extraordinary and unique and marvellous friendship with a lady who lives nearby. Let's call her Meg because she wouldn't like her name to be known on the air. Meg is absolutely extraordinary, and we have transformed each other's lives. There's been a renaissance from this black pit. It's part of the good fortune of my life that this should be so.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's part of a poem by Ernest Dassen, but when the feast is finished and the lamps expire, there forth thy shadow, Sanara, the night is thine, and I am desolate and sick of an old fashion yea hungry for the lips of my desire. Was from that that I took the title You see this terrible drama goes on for some time. Ah, and one is seized by it. But after the funeral The curtain falls, silence falls. Well, I found that on Margaret's computer she had kept a little department characteristically called my health. about her cancer. And so, assisted by that and novels that I had kept. I wrote When the feast is finished, and the book was published. Still, the People write to me or phone me or appear on my doorstep to say how grateful they are for that book, that very sad book of bereavement, and how you face it.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that was rather funny, really. One day I was in my study and the phone rang, I picked it up, and it was Stanley Kubrick, and he talked and talked and talked and talked. So eventually he said shall we have lunch? Yeah. So I went to Pinewood, we had lunch, and we had a jolly good time. It was great fun. And so I went to work with him for a year and we were trying to make a monster movie from this little cameo, really called Super Toys Last All Summer Long. I said you could never make this into a big movie, and Stanley said, Oh yes, I could. And we were both wrong, you see, he couldn't. Stanley died. But Spielberg could.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, what the next record is an old favorite, you know, when something particularly sentimental and ghastly was happening in England, you'd need a dose of private eye or Tom Larer, who could be awful about anything, including a song for World War III, Solong Mom.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I met Margaret while I was down in this one room in the An Oxford slump called Paradise Square. It's now a multistory car park, alas. Margaret Yes she was shy, reserved, extremely pretty. And she smelt gorgeous, and she had lots of other virtues too. And one of those virtues. Was that she like the first wife produced two children, a boy and then a girl? Another remarkable thing is that those four, to my knowledge at least, you don't know what your children think always were without jealousy and got on with each other. Just Martha's, really marvelous.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't think so. I think that I always write because, well, it got me out of many scrapes for one thing. Yes, I kept on writing. I always wrote.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I was literary editor of the Oxford Mail when it was a broadsheet, and I lived in one room with a few books, no money I was forty then, I think. But almost immediately Statuette of a rocket ship like a needle, and it said that I had won a Hugo, which is the Oscar of the SF Field, for my Noel Hot House. And so from sinking down I was bouncing up again, and I have continued to bounce ever since.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It certainly, although it was not a great success, it provided the world with two marvellous people Wendy and Clive And well, if you feel that you're not loved, the corollary is that you feel you're not worth loving. Anyhow, it didn't really work except to produce these two extraordinary children.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, thank goodness for that because you'll be able to hear a Croatian folk song from the days of Yugoslavia called Olo Moya. Oh my darling.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, this is where we go abroad again. You realize I don't have an English work here or foreign. It's terrible, isn't it?”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, really a novel texture about a year to write, so you've not got to be bored by it, so you don't plan it, or I don't plan it. I embark on it, and it's a voyage of discovery. And at one time, early in my career, I was having lunch with Agatha Christie, and she was a very sympathetic woman, rather grand. And I said I can't see how you managed to write such a complex novel. And she said, Oh, it's quite easy, really. I'd just go ahead and I write the novel, but I stop at the penultimate chapter, and then I think who's the most unlikely character to have committed the murder? that when she settled on this, she just goes back and corrects a train timetable here and adjusts a relationship there, and then she goes on and writes it. And of course, everyone is baffled and enchanted.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It isn't all that difficult, but Doris Lessing told me long ago it wasn't Doris, it was Iris Murdoch. Iris said You must never tell anyone how much you enjoy writing. You must always make out that it's really hard work. Well, it is hard work, but it's also The second most enjoyable thing you can do in life.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Almost immediately, despite the fact my publisher, my literary agent, and my beloved father already mentioned all advised against it, so I became an independent writer.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was because when I was back in Civi Street, it was very hard to adjust. I was determined to be a writer, and rather than starve in a garret, I starved in a bookshop in Oxford And I thought I could write a column, a comic column. And so I did a column called the Bright Fount Diaries. And eventually got a letter from Faber and Faber, the publishers of the day, who said we're all fans of Bright fans. Would you like to make them into a book? I can't tell you the bliss of that moment. Of course I would like to make them into a book.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When the next record is going to be I've always loved Offenbach is marvellous operas and from Orpheus in the underworld there's a song sung by Chiron, who was the king of the Bootians in life, and now he's just a ferryman ferrying Orpheus and Co across the styx and this is the melancholy little kind of a love song that he sings to one of the women as they're going across the sticks.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was impossible to follow his advice, but a brothel in the far east at that time was quite different from a brothel now. It was a house where many poor fugitive young women had to live because Their husbands, their support, their fathers had all been killed in the war with the Japanese, so they had to live somewhere so they'd come to Singapore and Hong Kong. As a refuge. They were pretty and they were nice They were good ladies and what they had to sell was what men said. Needed to”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My father at least saw me to the bus that would take me to the train that would take me to the barracks that would take me to it. etc.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, if you don't wash or have your hair cut for six months, it's absolute paradise when you're nineteen. There was always something interesting and extraordinary, often very frightening, it's true.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anything to get away from the family But many of the chaps who were perhaps only two or three years older than I were married and their lives were interrupted, but mine was not, mine continued, and so I was in good spirits, even though we were on half rations, etc, etc. And I mean water was so short you weren't allowed to wash, couldn't have your hair cut, a hairdresser was unnecessary.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's quite so. And as soon as I joined the army, I was sent to India. Indeed I celebrated my nineteenth birthday on the harbour front of Bombay.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the next record is the sort of thing that travellers might play. It's part of Borodin's in the steppes of Central Asia. It's a little tone poem.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, perhaps she was just afraid that I'd run off. I don't know. I don't know. But that was, I mean, I felt very uncomfortable in that situation, there's no doubt. But I suppose well I should say The family were busy sliding down the social ladder, so that eventually father ended up buying a sort of store, a general store. and my mother was in charge of the post office. And that was just fine for her. She could talk to all the customers, the customers would come in and they'd strange tittle tattle, and she then at last became a much more cheerful person, and indeed full of jokes.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think I thought it was rotten bad luck to be born into this family I don't know what I felt, but certainly we were good support for each other.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You see in a way I was freed by the arrival of the sister Betty, because I was no longer my mother's captive as I had been. I mean, she would take me everywhere. including the Lou for safety. You know, I was like a pet dog, but once Betty was around, that was different, and eventually she and I formed an alliance.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I found it very, very difficult. I just can't tell you. I was actually distraught. For instance, I started wetting my bed again. How am I saying this? At one time I would never dare say it, but I'm in my eighties, I don't care, I can say these things I was very ashamed. But their solution was to send me away to boarding school. And so I went to a prep school and I had a look about this. I wasn't quite six. It's a time when a chap's still on friendly terms with his teddy bear, you know. And I lived hard then on a hard mattress, and on that sort of mattress, to use a metaphor, I lived for the next twenty years.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My grandfather had established what would now be called a big department store, and my father reigned supreme over the gent's clothing and accessories. I'm talking now about”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I was programmed to love my mother. As I think we are. As for my father I know you know you hear people complaining about their family upbringing. They were all drunkards, I would say. But unfortunately, it's just as bad if they're all teetalers. They're in a state of perpetual gloom and”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the Geretsky's symphony for sorrowful songs coming in very appropriately, and it's sung by Susan It balances on the very edge of boredom. While at the same time being hypnotic, it's an extraordinary piece. It seems to go on forever.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's about it, yes. And when I was five. Another little girl was born, my sister Betty. And it happened that at that time I had And you know if a baby gets hooping finished, so within the hour I was sent off to my grandmother. Within the hour so that when I came back to home I was extremely upset, and so my father had a ready solution he could send me off to boarding school.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That wasn't the case at all. And it was only when I was fifty, searching a graveyard that I found in a stretch of unconsecrated ground a little tombstone that said Sophie Aldis. That was my sister who had never lived. It's a most interesting story.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can't remember. And happily those little stories have long since disappeared. But I believe that they were highly imaginative, prompted by the fact that my mother at the time was in an awful fugue because her firstborn daughter had been stillborn, and she had set up a defence mechanism that the child had lived. And so I had to live with that child, this perfect child, and I could never be as her. And so I think the idea of pretense was in the air, and I do believe that although I accepted all this, some little part of me said this isn't real. That's the whole part of science fiction. It isn't real.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that's right. Well, you know, I still might actually climb that mountain. I've got three books coming out this year, and one of them I think very well of, so I am hopeful.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You hit it. No rivers would finally say, whoa. He'd wiping around, leaned back on the range, and talk about a place he's gonna go. One of these days I'm gonna climb that mountain, walk up there among them clouds where the cotton's high and the corns are grower and they ain't no field stripper.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Walter Brennan was a minor actor in Western movies, and suddenly he came out with this little song Old Rivers and I think it sort of epitomizes the way I feel about myself. For years I just wrote and wrote for the pleasure of it, and I have to admit for the pleasure of the sales of it round the world. But then suddenly I got the bug the idea that I could write better, that I could become not just a sky fi author, but that I could actually make it as a writer. Great error in my ways because I immediately became much more ambitious and therefore less happy, and that's where I connect with old rivers.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I don't know I don't know I mean people don't like tomatoes You can't explain why they don't like tomatoes You just feel that in some cases they're missing something I actually think that the great days of science fiction have perhaps passed now but the fact is that science fiction gave me an umbrella and it gave me endless friends who are still my friends I would never knock science fiction I think it's splendid”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't agree with those people who think that science fiction is some kind of prediction of the future. It may or it may not be. I think it's a metaphor and it's a metaphor for the human condition. There's certainly something in me that urgently needs expression, and it doesn't quite tell me what it is. You can understand this in the works of many writers, Thomas Hardy, for instance, writes about one thing, but thinks about another. And he can't quite tell you what he is thinking about. But I would think that suffered from loss from a very early age. And although I've recovered from it in theory, this is the sort of stamp that has been put on me.”
2007-01-28 · Desert Island Discs · Brian Aldiss · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source