Iain Banks Quotes
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Beauty is something that disappears when you try to define it.
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I remember being shocked when I discovered some of my school pals didn't have books in their homes. I thought it was like not having oxygen, or hot water.
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I still find it hard to understand that anyone could argue that you can't have machines that exhibit consciousness.
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My point has always been that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, science fiction has been the most important genre there is.
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Most mainstream male fiction is littered with heroines, and female characters are basically so great, you want to fall in love with them.
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He wanted to be who he was, not the person he would become if he lost the one trait that distinguished him from everybody else, no matter how perverse that decision seemed to others.
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In theory, I work an eight-hour day and a five-day week which means I can socialise with my pals who mostly have normal jobs like teaching and computer programming.
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I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!
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I'm not a great believer in awards-of course the fact that I've never won one has nothing to do with it at all!
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I've always loved Scotland, and I'm not a huge fan of big cities, to be honest. I like them to dip into for a bit, but I'm not sure I would want to live in one again.
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'You like music, Mr. Gurgeh?' Hamin asked, leaning over to the man. Gurgeh nodded. 'Well, a little does no harm.'
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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.
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I love writing and can't imagine not being able to do it. I want an easy life and if it had been difficult I wouldn't be doing it. I do admire writers who do it even though it costs them.
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'What, now?' 'Soon equates to good, later to worse, Uagen Zlepe, scholar. Therefore, immediacy.'
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'Let’s waste a little time, hmm?''A nice euphemism, sir,' she mused distantly. He smiled. 'Come and help me think of better ones.' She smiled and they both looked at each other. There was a long pause.
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Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.
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Technology determines the possibilities of society. It doesn't matter whether you start out from a fascist state or a communist state or a free-market state.
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As a writer, you get to play, you get alter time, you get to come up with the smart lines and the clever comebacks you wish you'd thought of.
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There came a point when if a conspiracy was that powerful and subtle it became pointless to worry about it.
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I think the future stopped looking American when you think back to Blade Runner and Neuromancer, when it started to look more Japanese.
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The youth was a cretin, and didn’t even realize that he was. He could think of no more disastrous combination.
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You have to have something worth saying and then the ability to say it- writing's a double skill, really.
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He was tall and very dark-skinned and he had fabulously blond hair and a voice that could raise bumps on your skin at a hundred meters, or, better still, millimeters.
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An excess of boringness does not make a thing interesting except in the driest academic sense. A place is not boring if you have to look really hard for something which is interesting. If there is absolutely nothing interesting about any particular place, then that is a perfectly interesting and quintessentially un-boring place.