Top 100 Iain Banks Quotes
#1. My gratitude extends beyond the limits of my capacity to express it,
Iain Banks
#2. I'm not a great believer in awards-of course the fact that I've never won one has nothing to do with it at all!
Iain Banks
#3. People were always sorry. Sorry they had done what they had done, sorry they were doing what they were doing, sorry they were going to do what they were going to do; but they still did whatever it is. The sorrow never stopped them; it just made them feel better. And so the sorrow never stopped.
Iain Banks
#4. I'm an only child so am happy with my own company and I don't really get lonely.
Iain Banks
#5. I just come up with the stories and write them as well as I can. There's not really a great deal of strokey-beard thinking going on.
Iain Banks
#6. I'm from out of town, he said breezily. This was true. He'd never been within a hundred light-years of the place.
Iain Banks
#7. Here, in the bare dark face of night A calm unhurried eye draws sight We see in what we think we fear The cloudings of our thought made clear
Iain Banks
#8. I've always loved Scotland, and I'm not a huge fan of big cities, to be honest. I like them to dip into for a bit, but I'm not sure I would want to live in one again.
Iain Banks
#9. I held my crotch, closed my eyes and repeated my secret catechism.
Iain Banks
#10. I enjoy it too much - even if I knew I'd never get a book published, I would still write. I enjoy the experience of getting thoughts and ideas and plots and characters organised into this narrative framework.
Iain Banks
#11. Willy, one of the guys at the distillery, comes up with what Oliver and I agree is the best definition of what a 'dram' actually is: 'A measure of whisky that is pleasing to both guest and host.
Iain Banks
#12. Naturally, also, both sides were convinced they had right on their side, not that either was remotely naive enough to think that had any possible bearing on the outcome whatsoever.
Iain Banks
#13. My point has always been that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, science fiction has been the most important genre there is.
Iain Banks
#14. I don't really do themes. I might accidentally, but themes are an emergent phenomena of the writing of the book, of just trying to get a story out there.
Iain Banks
#15. It made me feel good to know that I could see him and he couldn't see me, and that I was aware and fully conscious and he wasn't
Iain Banks
#16. There is only darkness, starless and complete. The waves glitter like a million dull knives.
Iain Banks
#17. Even though he is mad and I am sane.
Iain Banks
#18. 'Dead Air' is full of rants; it's a rant-based book. Yes, it's self-indulgence. I plead guilty; mea culpa.
Iain Banks
#19. jammed inside the bastard for three hours.'). And that bridge, the bridge . . . have to make a pilgrimage to
Iain Banks
#20. Empathize with stupidity and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot
Iain Banks
#21. Future became Present, Present became Past. A truth so banal, so obvious and accepted that he had somehow managed to ignore it before.
Iain Banks
#22. There's this sloth in the jungle walking from one tree to another, and it's mugged by a gang of snails, and when the police ask the sloth if it could identify any of its attackers, it says, 'I don't know; it all happened so quickly...
Iain Banks
#23. Experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place.
Iain Banks
#24. It never ceased to amaze him how quickly a small child's face could turn from peach to beetroot.
Iain Banks
#25. A lot of what the 'Culture' is about is a reaction to all the science fiction I was reading in my very early teens.
Iain Banks
#26. I think the easiest people to fool are ourselves. Fooling ourselves may even be a necessary precondition for fooling others.
Iain Banks
#27. You like music, Mr. Gurgeh?" Hamin asked, leaning over to the man. Gurgeh nodded. "Well, a little does no harm.
Iain Banks
#28. I deliberately keep myself apart from a lot of stuff; I don't Tweet, I don't do Facebook, I don't blog, and that's largely because I spend my working life staring at a screen and hitting a keyboard, I am trying to cut down on that, not increase it.
Iain Banks
#29. You're a wicked man." "Thank you. It's taken years of diligent practice.
Iain Banks
#30. That would require faith. I do not beliebe in faith. I believe it exists but I do not believe it works. I don't know what the rules are here; I can't risk throwing everything away on a long shot.
Iain Banks
#31. I don't think you really belong here, Aviger." Xoxarle nodded wisely, slowly.
Aviger shrugged, and did not raise his eyes. "I don't think any of us do."
"The brave belong where they decide." Some harshness entered the Idiran's voice.
Iain Banks
#32. Och, stop being so sensitive, Prentice; it isn't much fun getting old. One of the few pleasures that do come your way is to speak your mind ... Certainly annoying your relatives is enjoyable too, but I expected better of you.
Iain Banks
#33. I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!
Iain Banks
#34. One should never mistake pattern for meaning.
Iain Banks
#35. Most mainstream male fiction is littered with heroines, and female characters are basically so great, you want to fall in love with them.
Iain Banks
#36. Any such inklings were like a few scattered grains of truth dissolved in an ocean of nonsense, and were anyway generally inextricably bound up with patently paranoid ravings which served only to devalue the small amounts of sense and pertinence with which they were associated.
Iain Banks
#37. In theory, I work an eight-hour day and a five-day week which means I can socialise with my pals who mostly have normal jobs like teaching and computer programming.
Iain Banks
#38. There has seldom if ever a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this simple fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots.
Iain Banks
#39. The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others
Iain Banks
#40. Mr Blawke always reminded me of a heron; I'm not sure why. Something to do with a sense of rapacious stillness, perhaps, and also the aura of one who knows time is on his side.
Iain Banks
#41. Something in your voice tells me we approach the question of remuneration.
Iain Banks
#42. Political correctness is what right-wing bigots call what everybody else calls being polite
Iain Banks
#43. He would never forget the feeling of that first year, the sense of freedom just being on his own gave him. He had his own room for the first time, his own money to spend as he wanted, his own food to buy and places to go and decisions to make; it was glorious, sublime.
Iain Banks
#44. Libertarianism. A simple-minded right-wing ideology ideally suited to those unable or unwilling to see past their own sociopathic self-regard.
Iain Banks
#45. I luv the ded, this old baster sez to me when I wiz tryin to get some innfurmashin out ov him. You fukin old pervirt I sez, gettin a bit fed up by this time enyway, an slit his throate; ah asks you whare the fukin Sleeping Byootie woz, no whit kind of humpin you lyke.
Iain Banks
#46. You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history
Iain Banks
#47. You get so caught up in what you're writing - action sequences tend to do that more than anything else because you're living it, and feeling for your characters.
Iain Banks
#48. Well," he sighed to no one in particular, and looked up into yet another alien sky. "Here we are again.
Iain Banks
#49. It looks perverted and wasteful to us, but then one thing that empires are not about is the efficient use of resources and the spread of happiness; both are typically accomplished despite the economic short-circuiting - corruption and favoritism, mostly - endemic to the system.
Iain Banks
#50. There's an old Sysan saying that the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it.
Iain Banks
#51. By the usual reckoning, the worst books make the best films.
Iain Banks
#52. An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.
Iain Banks
#53. Bright morning comes; the bloody-fingered dawn with zealous light sets seas of air ablaze and bends to earth another false beginning. My eyes open like cornflowers, stick, crusted with their own stale dew, then take that light.
Iain Banks
#54. Perhaps we think up our own destinies, and so in a sense deserve whatever happens to us, for not having had the wit to imagine something better.
Iain Banks
#55. The combination of modern ordnance and outdated tactics had, as usual, created enormous casualties on both sides.
Iain Banks
#56. My enemy is twice dead, and I still have him.
Iain Banks
#57. I remember being shocked when I discovered some of my school pals didn't have books in their homes. I thought it was like not having oxygen, or hot water.
Iain Banks
#58. Torture is such a slippery slope; as soon as you allow a society or any legal system to do that, almost instantly you get a situation where people are being tortured for very trivial reasons.
Iain Banks
#59. What is all your studying worth, all your learning, all your knowledge, if it doesn't lead to wisdom? And what's wisdom but knowing what is right, and what is the right thing to do?
Iain Banks
#60. Technology determines the possibilities of society. It doesn't matter whether you start out from a fascist state or a communist state or a free-market state.
Iain Banks
#61. Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying.
Iain Banks
#62. That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off ... and still have no good idea why you were really fighting.
Iain Banks
#63. It's a library, only the stupid or the evil are afraid of those
Iain Banks
#65. I am not being obtuse. You are being paranoid.
Iain Banks
#66. I love writing and can't imagine not being able to do it. I want an easy life and if it had been difficult I wouldn't be doing it. I do admire writers who do it even though it costs them.
Iain Banks
#67. It hung above the livid, bruised land like an admonition
Iain Banks
#68. Sometimes the thoughts and feelings I had didn't really agree with each other, so I decided I must be lots of different people inside my brain.
Iain Banks
#69. Even in my side of the world, I've been in publishing for what, 25 or 26 years, and it's gone from being a gentlemen's club to being a few big players, and it's very corporatised.
Iain Banks
#70. Probably the most blood came when I used a cheese grater on his knees.
Iain Banks
#71. After doing extensive research, I can definitely tell you that single malt whiskies are good to drink.
Iain Banks
#72. As long as a film stays unmade, the book is entirely yours, it belongs to the writer. As soon as you make it into a film, suddenly more people see it than have ever read the book.
Iain Banks
#73. Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.
Iain Banks
#74. You have to have something worth saying and then the ability to say it- writing's a double skill, really.
Iain Banks
#75. I think we need politicians; we need people who want to serve.
Iain Banks
#76. I am not answering these questions anymore," I said to him as I took my plate to the sink. "We should have gone metric years ago."
Iain Banks
Iain Banks
#77. Hey, Wrobik; cheer up, yeah? You're going to shoot down a fucking starship. It'll be an experience.
Iain Banks
#78. In so much of politics you're not allowed to disagree with what's been agreed.
Iain Banks
#79. Poor Eric came home to see his brother, only to find (Zap!Pow!Dams burst!Bombs go off!Wasps fry:ttssss!) he's got a sister.
Iain Banks
#80. I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.
Iain Banks
#81. I think a lot of people are frightened of technology and frightened of change, and the way to deal with something you're frightened of is to make fun of it. That's why science fiction fans are dismissed as geeks and nerds.
Iain Banks
#82. If you have any helpful suggestions I'd be pleased to hear them. If all you can do is make snide insinuations then it would probably benefit all concerned if you bestowed the fruits of your prodigious wit on someone with the spare time to give them the consideration they doubtless deserve.
Iain Banks
#83. It is an ocean of burning oil I am cast adrift upon, no sea's repose; I pass from waking agonies ... to the semiconscious trance of torment in which the smaller, earlier, deeper rings of the brain know only that the nerves scream, the body aches, and there is no one to turn crying to for comfort.
Iain Banks
#84. I'm a devoted husband. That must strike you as totally deviant.
Iain Banks
#85. As a writer, you get to play, you get alter time, you get to come up with the smart lines and the clever comebacks you wish you'd thought of.
Iain Banks
#86. Looking at me, you'd never guess I'd killed three people. It isn't fair.
Iain Banks
#87. Yes of course I know it's all a dream. Isn't everything?
Iain Banks
#88. What do I really want? he thinks. This is, of course, an extremely good question. It was just such a pity that, life being as it tended to be, it so rarely came as part of a matched pair, with an extremely good answer.
Iain Banks
#89. There is both fear and comfort to be drawn from devils
the fear speaks for itself, the comfort comes from being able to absolve oneself of responsibility for one's actions.
Iain Banks
#90. Science fiction is trying to find alternative ways of looking at realities.
Iain Banks
#91. There is a quite a lot of effort involved but I find action sequences some of the quickest to write and the most fun.
Iain Banks
#92. There's something very ... I don't know; primitive, perhaps, about you, Gurgeh. You've never changed sex, have you?' He shook his head. 'Or slept with a man?' Another shake. 'I thought so,' Yay said. 'You're strange, Gurgeh.' She drained her glass.
Iain Banks
#93. Look on the happy side, think of the good things. Hadn't it been clever? Yes, it had.
Iain Banks
#94. I still find it hard to understand that anyone could argue that you can't have machines that exhibit consciousness.
Iain Banks
#95. The flames had passed over those flattened blades and consumed their heather neighbours on either side while they themselves had remained, made proof against the blaze and guaranteed their stark survival just by their earlier oppression.
Iain Banks
#96. The sunset was really over, but a thunderously deep stain of red still lay across the furthest limit of the western sky. I looked out to it for a moment. Skye was somewhere out there, more felt than seen.
Iain Banks
#97. I think the future stopped looking American when you think back to Blade Runner and Neuromancer, when it started to look more Japanese.
Iain Banks
#98. He hit and fatally injured my innocent and unfortunate uncle whose muttered last words in hospital, before his coma became a full stop, were: 'My God, the buggers've learned to fly ...
Iain Banks
#99. Soon equates to good, later to worse, Uagen Zlepe, scholar. Therefore, immediacy.
Iain Banks
#100. Maybe it wasn't anything remotely to do with religion, mysticism or metaphilosophy after all; maybe it was more banal; maybe it was just ... accounting.
Iain Banks
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