Top 100 Iain Banks Quotes
#1. I don't think I have one particular favourite writer. I have many whose works I will always buy or reread - Muriel Spark, Anthony Powell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ruth Rendell, James Ellroy, William McIlvanney, Kate Atkinson, John Burnside, Louise Welsh, Iain Banks.
Ian Rankin
#2. 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
#3. My gratitude extends beyond the limits of my capacity to express it,
Iain Banks
#4. [I]f I suffered only one fool gladly, I assure you it would be you.
Iain M. Banks
#5. 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
#6. Faith is belief without reason; we operate on reason and nothing but. I have zero faith in my crew, just absolute confidence.
Iain M. Banks
#7. 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
#8. I'm an only child so am happy with my own company and I don't really get lonely.
Iain Banks
#9. then there's nothing worse I can wish on you than to be exactly the fuckhead you so obviously are.
Iain M. Banks
#10. 5126We are a mongrel race, our past a history of tangles, our sources obscure, our rowdy upbringing full of greedy, short-sighted empires and cruel, wasteful diasporas.
Iain M. Banks
#11. had nightmares I thought were really horrible until I woke up and remembered what reality was like at the moment,
Iain M. Banks
#12. 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
#13. Besides, it left the humans in the Culture free to take care of the things that really mattered in life, such as sports, games, romance, studying dead languages, barbarian societies and impossible problems, and climbing high mountains without the aid of a safety harness.
Iain M. Banks
#14. the rich just bribe their way out. So yes, as far as the rulers are concerned, it works.
Iain M. Banks
#16. Look at these humans! How could such glacial slowness even be called life? An age could pass, virtual empires rise and fall in the time they took to open their mouths to utter some new inanity!
Iain M. Banks
#17. All reality seemed to hinge on those infinitesimal bundles of meaning.
Iain M. Banks
#18. Fictional realms are usually terrible places to vacation, as they tend to be full of monsters and conflicts - Narnia and Middle-earth would both be good places to get killed - but I wouldn't mind visiting the worlds of Iain M. Banks's 'Culture.' You'd just have a hard time getting me to leave.
Tim Pratt
#19. You might call them soft, because they're very reluctant to kill, and they might agree with you, but they're soft the way the ocean is soft, and, well; ask any sea captain how harmless and puny the ocean can be.
Iain M. Banks
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. I held my crotch, closed my eyes and repeated my secret catechism.
Iain Banks
#24. He felt the slowly healing polarization of his mind, matching his to hers, the alignment of all his prejudices and conceits to the lodestone of the image she represented for him.
Iain M. Banks
#25. It meant something to climb, to haul this sack of bones and flesh all this way, and then look, then think, then be. She could have taken a flyer here any time when she'd been recovering, but she hadn't, even though Jase had suggested it. That was too easy. Being here wouldn't have meant anything.
Iain M. Banks
#26. Well, in the end, there was no helping this. Sometimes you just had to adopt the attitude summed up by, Too bad.
Iain M. Banks
#27. 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
#28. Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in the utmost suspicion.
Iain M. Banks
#29. 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
#30. Conscious cooperation was more efficient than feral competition?
Iain M. Banks
#31. 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
#32. My point has always been that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, science fiction has been the most important genre there is.
Iain Banks
#33. 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
#34. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead?
Iain M. Banks
#35. First person singular obtaining colloquial orgasm within a Caledonian sandwich' it said, then looked annoyed, and spoke incoherently into a grille set in its belly which replied. It looked up and said, 'Sorry, as I was saying: I come in peace
Iain M. Banks
#36. Ulver Seich woke up in the best possible way. She surfaced with a languorous slowness through fuzzy layers of luxurious half-dreams and memories of sweetness, sensuality and sheer carnal bliss ... to find it all merging rather splendidly into reality, and what was happening right now.
Iain M. Banks
#37. I had high hopes for that girl, but too much of that sort of nonsense and I think her intelligence will explosively dismantle
Iain M. Banks
#38. Common misconception that; that fun is relaxing. If it is, you're not doing it right.
Iain M. Banks
#39. 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
#40. There is only darkness, starless and complete. The waves glitter like a million dull knives.
Iain Banks
#41. the battle-memes of the invading alien consciousness aided by the thought processes and shared knowledge of the by now obviously completely overwhelmed ship. With
Iain M. Banks
#42. He remembers night, sleep, the bed, their shared comas,
A certain source of fondness in the night.
(She saw, no, expected, a dawn from every light.
Such was her fault)
Iain Banks
#43. The Idirans themselves had evolved on their planet Idir as the top monster from a whole planetful of monsters.
Iain M. Banks
#44. Even though he is mad and I am sane.
Iain Banks
#45. 'Dead Air' is full of rants; it's a rant-based book. Yes, it's self-indulgence. I plead guilty; mea culpa.
Iain Banks
#46. Ancient, vicious, discredited ideas backed with adolescent war mania. It's
Iain M. Banks
#47. But just because something does not have an ending doesn't mean it doesn't have a conclusion.
Iain M. Banks
#48. jammed inside the bastard for three hours.'). And that bridge, the bridge . . . have to make a pilgrimage to
Iain Banks
#49. Empathize with stupidity and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot
Iain Banks
#51. It was the Culture's fault. It considered itself too civilized and sophisticated to hate its enemies; instead it tried to understand them and their motives, so that it could out-think them and so that, when it won, it would treat them in a way which ensured they would not become enemies again. The
Iain M. Banks
#52. 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
#53. How about," Yay said, "magnetic fields under the base material and magnetized islands floating over oceans? No ordinary land at all; just great floating lumps of rock with streams and lakes and vegetation and a few intrepid people; doesn't that sound more exciting?
Iain M. Banks
#54. In another large journal book, he wrote his notes out again, along with further notes on the notes, and then started to cross words out of the completed, annotated notes, carefully removing word after word until he had something that looked like a poem. This was how he imagined poetry to be made.
Iain M. Banks
#55. 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
#56. Insult, like many such feelings, is experienced in the soul of the person addressed; it is not something that can be granted or withheld by the person doing the addressing.
Iain M. Banks
#57. Meanwhile the Mind of Pittance watched over them, and looked out into the resounding silence and the sun-freckled darkness of the spaces between the stars, forever content and ineffably satisfied with the absence of anything remotely interesting happening.
Iain M. Banks
#59. The Jinmoti of Bozlen Two kill the hereditary ritual assassins of the new Yearking's immediate family by drowning them in the tears of the Continental Empathaur in its Sadness Season.
Iain M. Banks
#61. The ignobility of thought and action that desperation born of indigence produces.
Iain M. Banks
#62. And was taken to the Forward Docks and a big, brightly lit hangar, where the Psychopath Class ex-Rapid Offensive Unit Frank Exchange of Views was waiting for her. Ulver laughed. 'It looks,' she snorted, 'like a dildo!' 'That's appropriate,' Churt Lyne said. 'Armed, it can fuck solar systems.
Iain M. Banks
#63. Because I do enjoy winning, because I do have something nobody can copy, something nobody else can have; I'm me; I'm one of the best.
Iain M. Banks
#64. Myself," said the drone sniffily, "I have never been able to see what virtue there could be in something that was eighty percent water.
Iain M. Banks
#65. The smell was that of a sewer under an abattoir.
Iain M. Banks
#66. That's why you can destroy them, win an argument, prove the other person wrong, and still they believe what they did in the first place." He
Iain M. Banks
#67. One believed what one was told to believe, what it made sense to believe. Unless one was a foreigner, of course, or a philosopher.
Iain M. Banks
#68. That's what we've lost, you know. What you've lost; all of you. A sense of wonder and awe and ... sin. These people know there are still things they don't know, things that can still go wrong, things they can still do wrong.
Iain M. Banks
#70. Half the fun of writing a novel is finding out from other people later on what you actually meant.
Iain Banks
#71. The only desire the Culture could not satisfy from within itself was one common to both the descendants of its original human stock and the machines they had (at however great a remove) brought into being: the urge not to feel useless.
Iain M. Banks
#72. It was clear that the delight being taken ... was not the vicarious pleasure of watching people enjoying themselves and identifying with them, but in seeing people being humiliated while others enjoyed themselves at their expense.
Iain M. Banks
#73. There are no gods, we are told, so I must make my own salvation.
Iain Banks
#74. He might come in useful.'
'Yeah. So's a broken leg if you want to kick yourself in the back of the head.
Iain M. Banks
#75. All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now.
Iain M. Banks
#76. 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
#77. We're not in prison, we're not junkies and we're not Young Tories ... it's no small achievement.
Iain Banks
#78. It never ceased to amaze him how quickly a small child's face could turn from peach to beetroot.
Iain Banks
#79. Obsession is just what those too timorous to follow an idea through to its logical conclusion call determination.
Iain M. Banks
#80. 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
#81. I think the easiest people to fool are ourselves. Fooling ourselves may even be a necessary precondition for fooling others.
Iain Banks
#82. Apparently I am what is known as an Unreliable Narrator, though of course if you believe everything you're told you deserve whatever you get.
Iain M. Banks
#83. The set-up assumes that the game and life are the same thing, and such is the pervasive nature of the idea of the game within the society that just by believing that, they make it so.
Iain M. Banks
#84. To touch this abomination with anything less perfectly attuned to its nature than the carefully dispersed wings of an engine field would be like an ancient, fragile rocket ship falling into a sun, like a wooden sea-ship encountering an atomic blast.
Iain M. Banks
#85. You like music, Mr. Gurgeh?" Hamin asked, leaning over to the man. Gurgeh nodded. "Well, a little does no harm.
Iain Banks
#86. 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
#87. Hersesy is denying the word of God, and the word of God is much more reliably expressed in the natural world as it's revealed through reason and science than in what I have heard described wonderfully as the giant book of Jewish fairy stories
Iain Banks
#88. All these people seemed to do was talk! It supposed it was just what biologicals did. If you wanted to feel you were still somehow in control of a ship or a fleet or even your civilisation, talking amongst yourselves seemed to be the way you convinced yourself of it. Finally
Iain M. Banks
#89. You're a wicked man." "Thank you. It's taken years of diligent practice.
Iain Banks
#90. I'm a fucking razor-arsed starship, you maniac! I'm not male, female or anything else except stupendously smart and right now tuned to smite. I don't give a fuck about flattering you. The few and frankly not vitally important sentiments I have concerning you I can switch off like flicking a switch.
Iain M. Banks
#91. Oh, adjust yourself. You people have spent ten millennia playing at soldiers while becoming ever more dedicated civilians. We've spent the last thousand years trying hard to stay civilian while refining the legacy of a won galactic war.
Iain M. Banks
#92. 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
#93. In life you hoped to do what you could but mostly you did what you were told and that was the end of it.
Iain M. Banks
#94. It was the soul of the machine, the ethological epicentre, the planetary ground zero of their commercial energy. I could almost feel it, shivering down like bomb-blasted rivers of glass from these undreaming towers of dark and light invading the snow-dark sky.
Iain M. Banks
#95. [A]ll her hardships had been self-inflicted and recreational in the past.
Iain M. Banks
#96. Behind it, still expanding, still radiating, still slowly dissolving in the system to which it had given its name, the unnumbered twinkling fragments of the Orbital called Vavatch blew out toward the stars, drifting on a stellar wind that rang and swirled with the fury of the world's destruction.
Iain M. Banks
#97. 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
#98. He wasn't sure himself why he was pulling his punches in this way, but somehow it seemed important not to let Contact know everything, to keep something back. It was a small victory against them a little-game, a gesture on a lesser board; a blow against the elements and the gods.
Iain M. Banks
#99. It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
She laughed. 'Really?'
The machine shrugged and let go of her hand. 'Oh, no. It's just something we tell ourselves.
Iain M. Banks
#100. 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
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