Iain Banks Quotes
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There is a saying that we provide the machines with an end, and they provide us with the means.
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I think we need politicians; we need people who want to serve.
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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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Beauty is something that disappears when you try to define it.
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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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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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'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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That’s the trouble with people like them, I suppose; whenever you think you’re detecting the first signs of them starting to behave responsibly, it’s just them being even more devious and underhand than usual.
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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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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'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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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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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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I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!
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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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Something in your voice tells me we approach the question of remuneration.
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Torture is such a slippery slope; as soon as you allow a society or any legal system to do that, almost instantly you get a situation where people are being tortured for very trivial reasons.
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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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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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Such a stupid act. Sometimes heroics revolted him; they seemed like an insult to the soldier who weighed the risks of the situation and made calm, cunning decisions based on experience and imagination, the sort of unshowy soldiering that didn’t win medals but wars.
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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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That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off...and still have no good idea why you were really fighting.
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Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.