Iain Banks famous quotes

Empathize with stupidity and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot
-- Iain Banks

#Thinking #Stupidity #Idiot

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

#Agony #People #Comfort

There's an old Sysan saying that the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it.
-- Iain Banks

#Tears #Soup #Life Is

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

#Book #Character #Writing

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

#Clever #Smart #Play

The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.
-- Iain Banks

#Real #Writing #Fiction

Science fiction is trying to find alternative ways of looking at realities.
-- Iain Banks

#Reality #Trying #Alternatives

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.
-- Iain Banks

#Atheist #Cancer #Thinking

By the usual reckoning, the worst books make the best films.
-- Iain Banks

#Book #Usual #Film

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

#Simple #Expression #Scarcity

People can be teachers and idiots; they can be philosophers and idiots; they can be politicians and idiots... in fact I think they have to be... a genius can be an idiot. The world is largely run for and by idiots; it is no great handicap in life and in certain areas is actually a distinct advantage and even a prerequisite for advancement.
-- Iain Banks

#Running #Teacher #Thinking

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.
-- Iain Banks

#Strong #Stupid #People

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

#Research #Drink #Malt

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 Banks

#Causes #Theory #Suspicion

My point has always been that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, science fiction has been the most important genre there is.
-- Iain Banks

#Important #Fiction #Revolution

You have to have something worth saying and then the ability to say it- writing's a double skill, really.
-- Iain Banks

#Writing #Skills #Ability

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

#Technology #Matter #Communist

One of your American professors said that to study religion was merely to know the mind of man, but if one truly wanted to know the mind of God, you must study physics.
-- Iain Banks

#Men #Mind #Study

One should never regret one's excesses, only one's failures of nerve.
-- Iain Banks

#Regret #Nerves #Excess

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

#Mean #Self #Common Sense

Political correctness is what right-wing bigots call what everybody else calls being polite
-- Iain Banks

#Wings #Political #Polite

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

#Eye #Secret #Catechism

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

#Cutting #Trying #Stuff

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

#Book #Years #Drawing

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

#Time #Auras #Sides

One of the advantages of having laws is the pleasure one may take in breaking them. We here are not children, Mr. Gurgeh." Hamin waved the pipestem round the tables of people. "Rules and laws exist only because we take pleasure in doing what they forbid, but as long as most of the people obey such proscriptions most of the time, they have done their job; blind obedience would imply we are ha!" Hamin chuckled and pointed at the drone with the pipe "no more than robots!
-- Iain Banks

#Jobs #Children #Law

...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.
-- Iain Banks

#Children #Sorry #Thinking

The History Of The Universe In Three Words CHAPTER ONE Bang! CHAPTER TWO sssss CHAPTER THREE crunch. THE END
-- Iain Banks

#Two #Bangs #Three

Well," he sighed to no one in particular, and looked up into yet another alien sky. "Here we are again.
-- Iain Banks

#Sky #Aliens #Wells

If this goes badly and I make a crater, I want it named after me!
-- Iain Banks

#Want

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 Banks

#Fall #Age #Looks

Writing is like everything else: the more you do it the better you get. Don't try to perfect as you go along, just get to the end of the damn thing. Accept imperfections. Get it finished and then you can go back. If you try to polish every sentence there's a chance you'll never get past the first chapter.
-- Iain Banks

#Writing #Past #Perfect

You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history
-- Iain Banks

#Needs #Fiction #Ends

You like music, Mr. Gurgeh?" Hamin asked, leaning over to the man. Gurgeh nodded. "Well, a little does no harm.
-- Iain Banks

#Men #Doe #Littles

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

#Writing #Character #Feelings

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

#Looks #Use #Empires

Half the fun of writing a novel is finding out from other people later on what you actually meant.
-- Iain Banks

#Fun #Writing #People

Soon equates to good, later to worse, Uagen Zlepe, scholar. Therefore, immediacy.
-- Iain Banks

#Immediacy #Scholar

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

#Men #Forever #Lasts

Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.
-- Iain Banks

#Exercise #Skills #Achievement

Something in your voice tells me we approach the question of remuneration.
-- Iain Banks

#Voice #Remuneration #Approach

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

#Stars #Distance #Fighting

The bomb lives only as it is falling.
-- Iain Banks

#Fall #Bombs