Iain M. Banks Quotes

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

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

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

I love writing and can't imagine not being able to do it. I want an easy life and if it had been difficult doing it I wouldn't be doing it. I do admire writers who do it even though it costs them.

You been mud wrestling..?' 'Only with my conscience.' 'Really? Who won?' 'Well, it was one of those rare occasions when violence really doesn't solve anything.

In life you hoped to do what you could but mostly you did what you were told and that was the end of it.

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.

Patience can be a means of letting matters mature to a proper state for action, not just a way of letting time slip away.

We are a race prone to monsters, she thought, and when we produce one we worship it.

The Culture gives us so much, but in fact it’s only taking things away from us, lobotimizings everybody in it, taking away their choices, their potential for being really good or even slightly bad.

All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself.

They speak very well of you".- "They speak very well of everybody."- "That so bad?"- "Yes. It means you can´t trust them.

the ignobility of thought and action that desperation born of indigence produces.

[T]here can be a form of vanity in grief that is indulged rather than suffered.

I have seen people who find that grief gives them something they never had before, and no matter how terrible and real their loss they choose to hug that awfulness to them rather than push it away.

[M]y determined and strenuous endeavours to take in absolutely nothing of what I had regarded as entirely the most irrelevant part of my schooling had patently not met with total success

One believed what one was told to believe, what it made sense to believe. Unless one was a foreigner, of course, or a philosopher.

Welcome to the future, she thought, surveying all this wordage and tat. All our tragedies and triumphs, our lives and deaths, our shames and joys are just stuffing for your emptiness.

The trick, he supposed, was never to lose sight of the theoretical possibility while not for a moment taking the idea remotely seriously.

The History Of The Universe In Three WordsCHAPTER ONEBang!CHAPTER TWOsssssCHAPTER THREEcrunch.THE END