Quotes by Iain Banks

Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; that’s the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant ones, the most enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms? Yes, we’re hedonists, Mr. Bora Horza Gobuchul. We seek pleasure and have fashioned ourselves so that we can take more of it; admitted. We are what we are. But what about you? What does that make you?

Dont 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 dies with you. How sad, Dorolow said, looking back from Horza to the screen. The Changer let the remark pass.

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.

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 cant leave her like that. You cant do that to the woman. She doesnt deserve it; nobody does. You dont belong to her and she doesnt belong to you, but youre 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.

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 of this simple fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots.

Yes of course I know its all a dream. Isnt 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 yet fully woken up, and events within its sleek hull still moved to another, slower tempo, made half of dreams.

In the end, he had to admit, he didnt really understand her. He didnt understand women. He didnt understand men. He didnt even understand children very well. All he really understood, he thought, was himself and the rest of the universe. Neither anything like completely, of course, but both well enough to know that what remained to be discovered would make sense; it would fit in, it could all be gradually and patiently fitted together a bit at a time, like an infinite jigsaw puzzle, with no straight edges to look for and no end in sight, but one in which there was always going to be somewhere for absolutely any piece to fit.

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

it is an ocean of burning oil I am cast adrift upon, no sea’s repose; I pass from waking agonies… to the semiconscious trance of torment in which the smaller, earlier, deeper rings of the brain know only that the nerves scream, the body aches, and there is no one to turn crying to for comfort.

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.

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 Linters place was, and I looked across it and there was a little notice on the wall saying it was forbidden to take photographs of the courtyard without the mans permission. [..] They want to own the light!

Hey, Wrobik; cheer up, yeah? Youre going to shoot down a fucking starship. Itll be an experience.

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 before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others

Oh, no, Cameron; I believe were born free of sin and free of guilt. Its just that we all catch it, eventually. There are no clean rooms for morality, Cameron, no boys in bubbles kept in a guilt-free sterile zone. There are monasteries and nunneries, and people become recluses, but even thats just an elegant way of giving up. Washing ones hand didnt work two thousand years ago, and it doesnt work today. Involvement, Cameron, connection.

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

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 ones actions.

This is so much like the old days. And, again, I have mixed feelings. In some ways its good and comfortable to be fitting straight back in like Ive never been away, but, on the other hand, Im getting this constrictive feeling as well. Its the same places - like the bars and pubs on Friday night - the same people, the same conversations, the same arguments and the same attitudes. Five years away and not much seems to have changed. I cant decide if this is good or bad.

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.