Iain Banks Quotes

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.

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.

Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change… If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual’s circumstances — and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse — then you don’t have life after death; you just have death.

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.

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.

One of the advantages of having laws is the pleasure one may take in breaking them.

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

It was the day my grandmother exploded.

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.

Even galaxy-spanning anarchist utopias of stupefying full-spectrum civilisational power have turf wars within their unacknowledged militaries.

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

Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another.