steve aylett

“On July 13, 1994, Lint had a near-death experience, followed immediately by death.”

“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”

“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”

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

“Seemed she should learn to smile when she was unhappy, to stop laughing, to speak up, to never speak to strangers, to share guilt for the acts of strangers, that strangers made the laws of the land, that the laws of the land valued things over life, that life ended if a stranger decided it, to be where she could be found, to feel one thing and do another. How could she hang so many contradictions in one skull”

“Used a replica gun to steal a replica sportscar and experienced a replica of remorse”

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

“Since childhood I’d been suspected of imagination”

“Life and death have equal authority in nature. When laws contradict so fundamentally they cause mere confusion in the average soul ”

“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 had long been curious at leaders intermittent calls for a return to past values and had tested the notion by trying to build a house from the sky downwards”

“I crept in to find my father with pennies on his eyes - and looking closer I saw they were made of foil-covered chocolate. Of course I stole and ate them. Magical guilt? Tell me about it”

“Parker always felt things in his bones because, he said, it saved space”

“We have truth in order not to die of art.”

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

“...carved dolls stick to the rules.”

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

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

“Ideas are self-replenishing, like snot”

“I owed no morality to those who would extort it by force”

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

“The clerk tripped on the carpet, hit a window and went through, carrying with him a vase which had been on the sill. His skull broke like the vase and the vase broke like his skull, and both burst forth water mainly, and from the vase some flowers. If I could choose a death I’d make it something like that, except I’d add a good woman and some lard.”

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

“Those who lead double lives do so because they can only count that far”

“He said he didn’t like my kind and I was filled with the delirious expectation that he would identify me as a common species - that there were others like myself. I controlled my excitement, but he seemed to sense it - his gaze wavered uncertainly.”

“Dreams always end before you kill the last person.”

“What’s that thing when someone gets a knock on the head and suddenly can’t remember anything about himself?’Death,’ said the barman, his face a mask of disapproval.”

“The law is where reality goes to die.”

“An office is a machine for dying.”

“Gun stripping is the tea ceremony of America.”

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

“Murder’s the taking of one man’s life by another - war’s the other way around.”

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

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

“Oppression evolves, like everything else.”

“...to him Marx and Rand were the same because he went by pant size”

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

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

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

“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.”

“Freedom in cyberspace’d be fine and dandy if we happened to live there.”

“There’s no such thing as a normal angel. It’s never done that way.”

“Any act worth a damn can not be ignored and when an effective person is ignored it’s the result of a deliberate series of steps on his or her part.”

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

“No matter how good the idea, there’s always an advocate extreme enough to deter people.”

“The trustiest rule of social disintegration: bars burn last.”

“Honesty is the voice that is acceptable in every matter.”

“Sanity’s a virginity of the mind”

“Eddie knelt and lifted a rock. ‘Lawyers,’ he whispered.”