Iain Banks Quotes

All I said was that I thought it was a judgement from God that Blyth had first lost his leg and then...

You know, when I was in Paris, seeing Linter for the first time, I was standing at the top of some s...

Hey, Wrobik; cheer up, yeah? You're going to shoot down a fucking starship. It'll be an experience.

...for all its apparent speed, the ship was almost perfectly silent, and he experienced an enervatin...

Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetti...

There's something very... I don't know; primitive, perhaps, about you, Gurgeh. You've never changed ...

Escape is a commodity like anything else

The flames had passed over those flattened blades and consumed their heather neighbours on either si...

Och, stop being so sensitive, Prentice; it isn't much fun getting old. One of the few pleasures that...

One of your American professors said that to study religion was merely to know the mind of man, but ...

I think the easiest people to fool are ourselves. Fooling ourselves may even be a necessary precondi...

This is so much like the old days. And, again, I have mixed feelings. In some ways it's good and com...

Look on the happy side, think of the good things. Hadn't it been clever? Yes, it had.

Don't you have a religion?" Dorolow asked Horza."Yes," he replied, not taking his eyes away from the...

I sucked that smoke in and made it part of me, joined mystically with the universe right at that poi...

Oh, no, Cameron; I believe we're born free of sin and free of guilt. It's just that we all catch it,...

The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have ...

Bright morning comes; the bloody-fingered dawn with zealous light sets seas of air ablaze and bends ...

...and I confess that, like a child, I cry. Ah, self-pity; I think we are at our most honest and sin...

As long as a film stays unmade, the book is entirely yours, it belongs to the writer. As soon as you...

Torture is such a slippery slope; as soon as you allow a society or any legal system to do that, alm...

In the end, he had to admit, he didn't really understand her. He didn't understand women. He didn't ...

Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately...

To want more was not just childish, but cowardly, and somehow constpatory too. Death was change; it ...

Maybe he's up to something, maybe he'ś not really crazy after all. Perhaps he just got fed up acting...

I killed little Esmerelda because I felt I owed it to myself and to the world in general. I had, aft...

My point has always been that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, science fiction has been the mo...

Anyway, you can't leave her like that. You can't do that to the woman. She doesn't deserve it; nobod...

It's like a sealed, forgotten chamber in me; I shan't feel complete until I've discovered its entran...

There are no gods, we are told, so I must make my own salvation.

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

I switched the light out again. The room was totally dark, not even the starlight showing while my e...

There has seldom if ever a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the se...

there is both fear and comfort to be drawn from devils--the fear speaks for itself, the comfort come...

it is an ocean of burning oil I am cast adrift upon, no sea’s repose; I pass from waking agonies… to...

I don't think you really belong here, Aviger." Xoxarle nodded wisely, slowly.Aviger shrugged, and di...

Yes of course I know it's all a dream. Isn't everything?

Let's be clear: unless I have profoundly misunderstood its position, I pretty much despise American ...

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

You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap abo...