Iain Banks Quotes

Iain Banks's quotes come across as stark, examining war, technology, and alien life.

24 quotes

1. The combination of modern ordnance and outdated tactics had, as ever, created enormous casualties on both sides.

2. A human exposed without protection to the conditions required to support Affronter life would be dying in at least three excitingly different and painful ways anyway without having to worry about being crushed by a cage of leg-thick tentacles.

3. It was used mainly as a regimental mess and dining hall and so was hung with flags, banners, the hides of enemies, bits and pieces of old weapons and military paraphenalia.

4. Serious up-cannoning on our part, for all its for all its intrinsic vulgarity and first-principle undesirability, may be the only way to prevent scalar inter-civilization conflicts...

5. It was just like some ancient electricity-powered computer; it didn't matter how fast, error-free, and tireless it was, it didn't matter how great a labour-saving boon it was, it didn't matter what it could do our how many different ways it could amaze; if you pulled its plug out, or just hit the Off button, all it became was a lump of matter; all its programs became just settings, dead instructions, and all its computations vanished as quickly as they'd moved. It was, also, like the dependency of the human-basic brain on the human-basic body; no matter how intelligent, perceptive and gifted you were, no matter how entirely you lived for the ascetic rewards of the intellect and eschewed the material world and the ignobility of the flesh, if you heart just gave out... That was the Dependency Principle; that you could never forget where your Off switches were located, even if it was somewhere tiresome.

6. The double-sun system was relatively poor in comets; there were only a hundred billion of them.

7. ...there came a point when if a conspiracy was that powerful and subtle it became pointless to worry about it.

8. 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.

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

10. 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!

11. One should never mistake pattern for meaning.

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

13. All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now. All the rest was fantasy.

14. 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.

15. A guilty system recognizes no innocents.

16. 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.

17. 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.

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

19. 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.

20. 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.

21. 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.

22. I am not being obtuse. You are being paranoid.

23. 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.

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