Best 112 quotes of Iain Banks on MyQuotes

Iain Banks

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    After doing extensive research, I can definitely tell you that single malt whiskies are good to drink.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    A guilty system recognizes no innocents.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    All our lives are symbols. Everything we do is part of a pattern we have at least some say in. The strong make their own patterns and influence other people's, the weak have their courses mapped out for them. The weak and the unlucky, and the stupid.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    A lot of what the 'Culture' is about is a reaction to all the science fiction I was reading in my very early teens.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    ...and I confess that, like a child, I cry. Ah, self-pity; I think we are at our most honest and sincere when we feel sorry for ourselves.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    Anyway, you can't leave her like that. You can't do that to the woman. She doesn't deserve it; nobody does. You don't belong to her and she doesn't belong to you, but you're both part of each other; if she got up and left now and walked away and you never saw each other again for the rest of your lives, and you lived an ordinary waking life for another fifty years, even so on your deathbed you would still know she was part of you.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    But it was pointless, it was stupid; he thought about thoughtless things. If I were a seabird . . . but how could you be a seabird? If you were a seabird your brain would be tiny and stupid and you would love half-rotted fish guts and tweaking the eyes out of little grazing animals; you would know no poetry and you could never appreciate flying as fully as the human on the ground yearning to be you. If you wanted to be a seabird you deserved to be one.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    By the usual reckoning, the worst books make the best films.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    ...[Changers] were a threat to identity, a challenge to the individualism even of those they were never likely to impersonate. It had nothing to do with souls or physical or spiritual possession; it was, as the Idirans well understood, the behavouristic copying of another which revolted. Individuality, the thing which most humans held more precious than anything else about themselves, was somehow cheapened by the ease with which a Changer could ignore it as a limitation and use it as a disguise.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    Dead Air' is full of rants; it's a rant-based book. Yes, it's self-indulgence. I plead guilty; mea culpa.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    "Don't you have a religion?" Dorolow asked Horza. "Yes," he replied, not taking his eyes away from the screen on the wall above the end of the main mess-room table. "My survival.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    Empathize with stupidity and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    Empires are synonymous with centralized if occasionally schismatized hierarchical power structures in which influence is restricted to an economically privileged class retaining its advantages through usually a judicious use of oppression and skilled manipulation of both the society's information dissemination systems and its lesser as a rule nominally independent power systems. In short, it's all about dominance.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    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

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    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".

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    I am, as I have always been, of the opinion that while the niceties of normal moral constraints should be our guides, they must not be our masters.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    I held my crotch, closed my eyes and repeated my secret catechism.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    I just took [my cancer diagnosis] as bad luck, basically. It did strike me almost immediately, my atheist sort of thing kicked in and I thought "ha, if I was a God-botherer, I'd be thinking, why me God? What have I done to deserve this?" and I thought at least I'm free of that, at least I can simply treat it as bad luck and get on with it.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    I'm a devoted husband. That must strike you as totally deviant.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    I'm an only child so am happy with my own company and I don't really get lonely.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    I'm from out of town," he said breezily. This was true. He'd never been within a hundred light-years of the place.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    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!

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    I'm saying with very few exceptions nothing lasts forever, and among those exceptions, no work or thought of man is numbered.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    I'm too drunk to recall much of what I've said. Which, come to think of it, is probably just as well, judging by the way people who are normally quite sensible dissolve into gibbering, rude, opinionated and bombastic idiots once the alcohol molecules in their bloom-stream outnumber the neutrons, or whatever. Luckily, one only notices this if one stays sober oneself, so the solution is as pleasant (at the time, at least) as it is obvious.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    I still find it hard to understand that anyone could argue that you can't have machines that exhibit consciousness.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    I still have some of my old University essays, and I do still have my drawing book from primary year seven.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    "I think I know the real reason." "Which is?" "Alcohol in the dust clouds. Goddamn stuff is everywhere. Any lousy species ever invents the telescope and the spectroscope and starts looking in between the stars, what do they find?" He knocked the glass on the table. "Loads of stuff, but much of it alcohol." He drank from the glass. "Humanoids are the galaxy's way of trying to get rid of all that alcohol.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    I think the easiest people to fool are ourselves. Fooling ourselves may even be a necessary precondition for fooling others.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    I think the future stopped looking American when you think back to Blade Runner and Neuromancer, when it started to look more Japanese.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    It's a library, only the stupid or the evil are afraid of those

  • By Anonym
    Iain Banks

    It was a truism that all civilizations were basically neurotic until they made contact with everybody else and found their place within the ever-changing meta-civilisation of other beings, because, until then, during the stage when they honestly believed they might be entirely alone in existence, all solo societies were possessed of both an inflated sense of their own importance and a kind of existential terror at the sheer scale and apparent emptiness of the universe.