Quotes by Iain Banks

“it is an ocean of burning oil I am cast adrift upon, no seas repose; I pass from waking agonies to the semiconscious trance of torment in which the smaller, earlier, deeper rings of the brain know ...”

“Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; thats the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any con...”

“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 o...”

“Don't you have a religion?" Dorolow asked Horza."Yes," he replied, not taking his eyes away from the screen on the wall above the end of the main mess-room table. "My survival.""So... your religion...”

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

“...for all its apparent speed, the ship was almost perfectly silent, and he experienced an enervating, eerie feeling, as though the ancient warship, mothballed all those centuries, had somehow not ...”

“To want more was not just childish, but cowardly, and somehow constpatory too. Death was change; it led to new chances, new vacancies, new niches and opportunities; it was not all loss.”

“As long as a film stays unmade, the book is entirely yours, it belongs to the writer. As soon as you make it into a film, suddenly more people see it than have ever read the book.”

“In the end, he had to admit, he didn't really understand her. He didn't understand women. He didn't understand men. He didn't even understand children very well. All he really understood, he though...”

“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.”

“Anyway, you can't leave her like that. You can't do that to the woman. She doesn't deserve it; nobody does. You don't belong to her and she doesn't belong to you, but you're both part of each other...”

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

“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 ...”

“Oh, no, Cameron; I believe we're born free of sin and free of guilt. It's just that we all catch it, eventually. There are no clean rooms for morality, Cameron, no boys in bubbles kept in a guilt-f...”

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

“All I said was that I thought it was a judgement from God that Blyth had first lost his leg and then had the replacement become the instrument of his downfall. All because of the rabbits. Eric, who...”

“Bright morning comes; the bloody-fingered dawn with zealous light sets seas of air ablaze and bends to earth another false beginning. My eyes open like cornflowers, stick, crusted with their own st...”

“there is both fear and comfort to be drawn from devils--the fear speaks for itself, the comfort comes from being able to absolve oneself of responsibility for one's actions.”

“You know, when I was in Paris, seeing Linter for the first time, I was standing at the top of some steps in the courtyard where Linter's place was, and I looked across it and there was a little not...”

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