Iain Banks Quotes
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I deliberately keep myself apart from a lot of stuff; I don't Tweet, I don't do Facebook, I don't blog, and that's largely because I spend my working life staring at a screen and hitting a keyboard, I am trying to cut down on that, not increase it.
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The combination of modern ordnance and outdated tactics had, as usual, created enormous casualties on both sides.
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I enjoy it too much - even if I knew I'd never get a book published, I would still write. I enjoy the experience of getting thoughts and ideas and plots and characters organised into this narrative framework.
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Libertarianism. A simple-minded right-wing ideology ideally suited to those unable or unwilling to see past their own sociopathic self-regard.
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I don't really do themes. I might accidentally, but themes are an emergent phenomena of the writing of the book, of just trying to get a story out there.
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Science fiction is trying to find alternative ways of looking at realities.
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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.
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In so much of politics you're not allowed to disagree with what's been agreed.
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'Dead Air' is full of rants; it's a rant-based book. Yes, it's self-indulgence. I plead guilty; mea culpa.
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Sorrow be damned and all your plans. Fuck the faithful, fuck the committed, the dedicated, the true believers; fuck all the sure and certain people prepared to maim and kill whoever got in their way; fuck every cause that ended in murder and a child screaming.
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By the usual reckoning, the worst books make the best films.
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She took a deep breath. Suddenly, she felt quite entirely sober. 'Is this as important as I think it is?''Almost certainly much more so.''Oh,' she said, 'fuck.'
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There is a quite a lot of effort involved but I find action sequences some of the quickest to write and the most fun.
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A lot of what the 'Culture' is about is a reaction to all the science fiction I was reading in my very early teens.
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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.
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Smell is a very animal thing, almost reptilian, where the more cerebral things like reading less so.
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Even in my side of the world, I've been in publishing for what, 25 or 26 years, and it's gone from being a gentlemen's club to being a few big players, and it's very corporatised.
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I still have some of my old University essays, and I do still have my drawing book from primary year seven.
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Any such inklings were like a few scattered grains of truth dissolved in an ocean of nonsense, and were anyway generally inextricably bound up with patently paranoid ravings which served only to devalue the small amounts of sense and pertinence with which they were associated.
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While the forces of repression need to win every time, the progressive elements need only triumph once.
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I'm an only child so am happy with my own company and I don't really get lonely.
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You get so caught up in what you're writing - action sequences tend to do that more than anything else because you're living it, and feeling for your characters.
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I think we need politicians; we need people who want to serve.
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There is a saying that we provide the machines with an end, and they provide us with the means.