Iain Banks Quotes
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Beauty is something that disappears when you try to define it.
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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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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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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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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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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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I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!
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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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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'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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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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'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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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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He would give up then, and console himself with something she’d said: that you could not love what you fully understood. Love, she maintained, was a process, not a state. Held still, it withered. He wasn’t too sure about all that; he seemed to have found a calm clear serenity in himself he hadn’t even known was there, thanks to her.
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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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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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You have to have something worth saying and then the ability to say it- writing's a double skill, really.
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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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'You like music, Mr. Gurgeh?' Hamin asked, leaning over to the man. Gurgeh nodded. 'Well, a little does no harm.'
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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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Something in your voice tells me we approach the question of remuneration.