Quotes by Iain M. Banks

“I just took [my cancer diagnosis] as bad luck, basically. It did strike me almost immediately, my atheist sort of thing kicked in and I thought "ha, if I was a God-botherer, I'd be thinking, why me...”

“The one on the left," Worthil said, "is a male, carrying the testes and penis. The middle one is equipped with a kind of reversible vagina, and ovaries. The vagina turns inside-out to implant the f...”

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

“A temple was worth a dozen barracks; a militia man carrying a gun could control a small unarmed crowd only for as long as he was present; however, a single priest could put a policeman inside the h...”

“...a guilty system recognizes no innocents. As with any power apparatus which thinks everybodys either for it or against it, were against it. You would be too, if you thought about it. The very way...”

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

“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.”

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

“Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed," he said. "And I think they know in their hearts that other people are just the same, and one of the reasons people become angry when they ...”

“[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”

“What, anyway, was he to say? That intelligence could surpass and excel the blind force of evolution, with its emphasis on mutation, struggle and death? That conscious cooperation was more efficient...”

“The right place; that was what he was looking for. The right place. Place was all important, place meant everything. Take this rock"Take you, rock," he said. He squinted at it.Ah yes, here we have ...”

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

“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.”

“I can understand that people want to feel special and important and so on, but that self-obsession seems a bit pathetic somehow. Not being able to accept that you're just this collection of cells, ...”

“By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to p...”

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

“it had been briefed that when Culture people didnt speak Marain for a long time and did speak another language, they were liable to change; they acted differently, they started to think in that oth...”

“Marain, the Cultures quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, d...”

“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.”