Iain M. Banks Quotes

Perdition awaits at the end of a road constructed entirely from good intentions, the devil emerges from the details and hell abides in the small print.

— 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 God? What have I done to deserve this?" and I thought at least I'm free of that, at least I can simply treat it as bad luck and get on with it.”

— Iain M. Banks

“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.”

— Iain M. Banks

If this goes badly and I make a crater, I want it named after me!

— Iain M. Banks

“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 prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of the rules.”

— Iain M. Banks

“Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.”

— Iain M. Banks

“Truth, I have learned, differs for everybody. Just as no two people ever see a rainbow in exactly the same place - and yet both most certainly see it, while the person seemingly standing right underneath it does not see it at all - so truth is a question of where one stands, and the direction one is looking in at the time.”

— Iain M. Banks

“But what if someone kills somebody else?"
Gurgeh shrugged. "They're slap-droned."
"Ah! This sounds more like it. What does that drone do?"
"Follows you around and makes sure you never do it again."
"Is that all?"
"What more do you want? Social death, Hamin; you don't get invited to too many parties."
"Ah; but in your Culture, can't you gatecrash?"
"I suppose so," Gurgeh conceded. "But nobody'd talk to you.”

— Iain M. Banks

“They sought to take the unfairness out of existence, to remove the mistakes in the transmitted message of life which gave it any point or advancement ...”

— Iain M. Banks

“I'm saying with very few exceptions nothing lasts forever, and among those exceptions, no work or thought of man is numbered.”

— Iain M. Banks

“The set-up assumes that the game and life are the same thing, and such is the pervasive nature of the idea of the game within the society that just by believing that, they make it so.”

— Iain M. Banks

“Also while I'd been away, the ship had sent a request on a postcard to the BBC's World Service, asking for 'Mr David Bowie's "Space Oddity" for the good ship Arbitrary and all who sail in her.' (This from a machine that could have swamped Earth's entire electro-magnetic spectrum with whatever the hell it wanted from somewhere beyond Betelgeuse.) It didn't get the request played. The ship thought this was hilarious.”

— Iain M. Banks

“It must be a burden, not even being able to say you were just obeying orders." "Well, that is always a lie, or a sign you are fighting for an unworthy cause, or still have a very long way to develop civilizationally.”

— Iain M. Banks

Insult, like many such feelings, is experienced in the soul of the person addressed; it is not something that can be granted or withheld by the person doing the addressing.

— Iain M. Banks

“Imagine a vast and glittering ocean seen from a great height. It stretches to the clear curved limit of every angle of horizon, the sun burning on a billion tiny wavelets. Now imagine a smooth blanket of cloud above the ocean, a shell of black velvet suspended high above the water and also extending to the horizon, but keep the sparkle of the sea despite the lack of sun. Add to the cloud many sharp and tiny lights, scattered on the base of the inky overcast like glinting eyes: singly, in pairs or in larger groups, each positioned far, far away from any other set.”

— Iain M. Banks

“There came a point when if a conspiracy was that powerful and subtle it became pointless to worry about it.”

— Iain M. Banks

“As you say, DeWar, our shame comes from the comparison. We know we might be generous and compassionate and good, and could behave so, yet something else in our nature makes us otherwise." She smiled a small, empty smile. "Yes, I feel something I recognise as love. Something I remember, something I may discuss and mill and theorise over." She shook her head. "But it is not something I know. I am like a blind woman taking about how a tree must look, or a cloud. Love is something I have a dim memory of, the way someone who went blind in their early childhood might recall the sun, or the face of their mother. I know affection from my fellow whore-wives, DeWar, and I sense regard from you and feel some in return. I have a duty to the Protector, just as he feels he has a duty to me. As far as that goes, I am content. But love? That is for the living, and I am dead.”

— Iain M. Banks

“You could find out most things, if you knew the right questions to ask. Even if you didn't, you could still find out a lot.”

— Iain M. Banks

“Conscious cooperation was more efficient than feral competition?”

— Iain M. Banks

“Ferbin's father had had the same robustly pragmatic view of religion as he'd had of everything else. In his opinion, only the very poor and downtrodden really needed religion, to make their laborious lives more bearable. People craved self-importance; they longed to be told they mattered as individuals, not just as part of a mass of people or some historical process. They needed the reassurance that while their life might be hard, bitter and thankless, some reward would be theirs after death. Happily for the governing class, a well-formed faith also kept people from seeking their recompense in the here and now, through riot, insurrection or revolution.”

— Iain M. Banks

“I'm a fucking starship; I'm allowed to cheat.”

— Iain M. Banks

And was taken to the Forward Docks and a big, brightly lit hangar, where the Psychopath Class ex-Rapid Offensive Unit Frank Exchange of Views was waiting for her. Ulver laughed. 'It looks,' she snorted, 'like a dildo!' 'That's appropriate,' Churt Lyne said. 'Armed, it can fuck solar systems.

— Iain M. Banks

The Sublime. The almost tangible, entirely believable, mathematically verifiable nirvana just a few right-angle turns away from dear boring old reality: a vast, infinite, better-than-virtual ultra-existence with no Off switch, to which species and civilizations had been hauling their sorry tired-with-it-all behinds off to since - the story went - the galaxy had still been in metaphorical knee socks.

— Iain M. Banks

“The point, of course, is that the people who spent days and sweated buckets could also have taken an aircraft to the summit if all they'd wanted was to absorb the view. It is the struggle that they crave. The sense of achievement is produced by the route to and from the peak, not by the peak itself. It is just the fold between the pages." The avatar hesitated. It put its head a little to one side and narrowed its eyes. "How far do I have to take this analogy, Cr. Ziller?".”

— Iain M. Banks

“Very little matters very much and almost nothing matters greatly.”

— Iain M. Banks

“Theirs is a civilization of deprivation; ours of finely balanced satisfaction ever teetering on the brink of excess.”

— Iain M. Banks

The good soldier did as he was told, and if he had any sense at all volunteered for nothing, especially promotion.

— Iain M. Banks

“In another large journal book, he wrote his notes out again, along with further notes on the notes, and then started to cross words out of the completed, annotated notes, carefully removing word after word until he had something that looked like a poem. This was how he imagined poetry to be made.”

— Iain M. Banks

“Listen for somebody trying to talk to you ...
(Silence)
This from that very pit of night, naked in the wasteland, the ice-wind moaning his only covering, alone in the freezing darkness under a sky of chill obsidian
Whoever tried to talk to me? When did I ever listen? When was I ever other than just myself, caring only for myself?”

— Iain M. Banks

“Neeporlax presented something of a contrast.”

— Iain M. Banks

“The smell was that of a sewer under an abattoir.”

— Iain M. Banks

The ship left the construction bay of the factory craft with most of its fitting-out still to be done. Accelerating hard, its course a four-dimensional spiral through a blizzard of stars where it knew that only danger waited, it powered into hyperspace on spent engines from an overhauled craft of one class, watched its birthplace disappear astern with battle-damaged sensors from a second, and tested outdated weapon units cannibalized from yet another. Inside its warship body, in narrow, unlit, unheated, hard-vacuum spaces, constructor drones struggled to install or complete sensors, displacers, field generators, shield disruptors, laserfields, plasma chambers, warhead magazines, maneuvering units, repair systems and the thousands of other major and minor components required to make a functional warship. Gradually,

— Iain M. Banks

“See that little black thing sticking up?" Gurgeh looked. There was a little black bulb poking up through the surface of the red mud. "Yes." "That's his dick." Gurgeh looked suspiciously at the other man. "How exactly is that going to help him?" "The Uhnyrchal can breathe through their dicks," Za said. "That guy's fine; he'll be fighting in another club tomorrow night; maybe even later this evening.”

— Iain M. Banks

She'd asked him what it was like to be in there, doing nothing but then being woken up to speak to somebody you couldn't see. He'd said that it was like being woken from a deep and satisfying sleep, to be asked questions while you kept your eyes closed. He was quite happy. Sight was over-rated anyway.

— Iain M. Banks

“You been mud wrestling..?' 'Only with my conscience.' 'Really? Who won?' 'Well, it was one of those rare occasions when violence really doesn't solve anything.”

— Iain M. Banks

“The swirling mist lay in the bottom of such great bowls like a broth of dreams.”

— Iain M. Banks

“It was clear that the delight being taken ... was not the vicarious pleasure of watching people enjoying themselves and identifying with them, but in seeing people being humiliated while others enjoyed themselves at their expense.”

— Iain M. Banks

High in a turret of a great castle rising on a black crag above snowy plains, besieged and grand, crammed full of an empire's treasure, and he sitting by a log fire with a sad and lovely princess ... I used to dream about such things, he thought. I used to long for them, ache for them. They seemed the very stuff of life, its essence. So why does all this taste of ashes?

— Iain M. Banks

“He felt the slowly healing polarization of his mind, matching his to hers, the alignment of all his prejudices and conceits to the lodestone of the image she represented for him.”

— Iain M. Banks

Hup! ... and here we are, waking up. Quick scan around, nothing immediately threatening, it would seem ... Hmm. Floating in space. Odd. Nobody else around. That's funny. View's a bit degraded. Oh-oh, that's a bad sign. Don't feel quite right, either. Stuff missing here ... Clock running way slow, like it's down amongst the electronics crap ... Run full system check ... Oh, good grief!

— Iain M. Banks

“She was one of the unfortunates trying to get some sort of human grasp of Earth's economics, and deserved all the light relief she could get. I recall that all through that year you could tell the economists by their distraught look and slightly glazed-looking eyes.”

— Iain M. Banks

“Ulver Seich woke up in the best possible way.  She surfaced with a languorous slowness through fuzzy layers of luxurious half-dreams and memories of sweetness, sensuality and sheer carnal bliss ... to find it all merging rather splendidly into reality, and what was happening right now.”

— Iain M. Banks

“5126We are a mongrel race, our past a history of tangles, our sources obscure, our rowdy upbringing full of greedy, short-sighted empires and cruel, wasteful diasporas.”

— Iain M. Banks

Bob-nodded toward the open module door. After you.

— Iain M. Banks

Living either never has any point, or is always its own point; being a naturally cheery soul, I lean towards the latter.

— Iain M. Banks

“The breaks and the times when he slept were irrelevant; just the intervals between the real life of the board and the game. He functioned, talking to the drone or the ship or other people, eating and sleeping and walking around ... but it was all nothing; irrelevant. Everything outside was just a setting and a background for the game.”

— Iain M. Banks

But there we are. Some things never do make perfect sense. There must be some explanation, and it is perhaps a little like the Doctrine of the Perfect Partner. We must be content to know that she exists, somewhere in the world, and try not to care overmuch that we will probably never meet her.

— Iain M. Banks

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 head of every one of their flock, for ever.

— Iain M. Banks

I'm a fucking razor-arsed starship, you maniac! I'm not male, female or anything else except stupendously smart and right now tuned to smite. I don't give a fuck about flattering you. The few and frankly not vitally important sentiments I have concerning you I can switch off like flicking a switch.

— Iain M. Banks

“Just because that was the start of a thousand sentimental stories didn't mean that it didn't actually happen.”

— Iain M. Banks