Iain Banks Quotes - Page 4

I still find it hard to understand that anyone could argue that you can't have machines that exhibit consciousness.

I am, as I have always been, of the opinion that while the niceties of normal moral constraints should be our guides, they must not be our masters.

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; if she got up and left now and walked away and you never saw each other again for the rest of your lives, and you lived an ordinary waking life for another fifty years, even so on your deathbed you would still know she was part of you.

I'm from out of town," he said breezily. This was true. He'd never been within a hundred light-years of the place.

Escape is a consumer goods like another

It looks perverted and wasteful to us, but then one thing that empires are not about is the efficient use of resources and the spread of happiness; both are typically accomplished despite the economic short-circuiting - corruption and favoritism, mostly- endemic to the system.

Here, in the bare dark face of night A calm unhurried eye draws sight We see in what we think we fear The cloudings of our thought made clear

My point has always been that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, science fiction has been the most important genre there is.

I just come up with the stories and write them as well as I can. There's not really a great deal of strokey-beard thinking going on.

I held my crotch, closed my eyes and repeated my secret catechism.

There is a quite a lot of effort involved but I find action sequences some of the quickest to write and the most fun.

-"Then what," Lededje asked, trying to keep her voice cold and not get caught up in the avatar´s obvious enthusiasm, "is making you smile about a disaster?" -"Well, first, I didn´t cause it! Nothing to do with me, hands clean. Always a bonus.

What's one more meaningless act of violence on that zoo of a planet? It would be appropriate. When in Rome; burn it.

I think we need politicians; we need people who want to serve.

I think the future stopped looking American when you think back to Blade Runner and Neuromancer, when it started to look more Japanese.

I'm an only child so am happy with my own company and I don't really get lonely.

I'm a devoted husband. That must strike you as totally deviant.

In so much of politics you're not allowed to disagree with what's been agreed.

A lot of what the 'Culture' is about is a reaction to all the science fiction I was reading in my very early teens.

Dead Air' is full of rants; it's a rant-based book. Yes, it's self-indulgence. I plead guilty; mea culpa.

Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.

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.

Most mainstream male fiction is littered with heroines, and female characters are basically so great, you want to fall in love with them.

Science fiction has its own history, its own legacy of what's been done, what's been superseded, what's so much part of the furniture it's practically part of the fabric now, what's become no more than a joke... and so on. It's just plain foolish, as well as comically arrogant, to ignore all this, to fail to do the most basic research.

But it was pointless, it was stupid; he thought about thoughtless things. If I were a seabird . . . but how could you be a seabird? If you were a seabird your brain would be tiny and stupid and you would love half-rotted fish guts and tweaking the eyes out of little grazing animals; you would know no poetry and you could never appreciate flying as fully as the human on the ground yearning to be you. If you wanted to be a seabird you deserved to be one.