Iain Banks
Iain Banks
Iain Bankswas a Scottish author. He wrote mainstream fiction under the name Iain Banks and science fiction as Iain M. Banks, including the initial of his adopted middle name Menzies...
NationalityScottish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth16 February 1954
mean cynical speak
They speak very well of you". - "They speak very well of everybody." - "That so bad?" - "Yes. It means you can´t trust them.
thinking people argument
I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.
stupid hate men
My greatest enemies are Women and the Sea. These things I hate. Women because they are weak and stupid and live in the shadow of men and are nothing compared to them, and the Sea because it has always frustrated me, destroying what I have built, washing away what I have left, wiping clean the marks I have made.
mean self common-sense
Experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place.
mistake patterns should
One should never mistake pattern for meaning.
enemy answers knows
He knew all the answers. Everybody did. Everybody knew everything and everybody knew all the answers. It was just that the enemy seemed to know better ones.
stupid evil library
It's a library, only the stupid or the evil are afraid of those
zoos rome violence
What's one more meaningless act of violence on that zoo of a planet? It would be appropriate. When in Rome; burn it.
letting-go regret hands
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said. She laughed. 'Really?' The machine shrugged and let go of her hand. 'Oh, no. It's just something we tell ourselves.
years doe fifty
Anyway, you can't leave her like that. You can't do that to the woman. She doesn't deserve it; nobody does. You don't belong to her and she doesn't belong to you, but you're both part of each other; if she got up and left now and walked away and you never saw each other again for the rest of your lives, and you lived an ordinary waking life for another fifty years, even so on your deathbed you would still know she was part of you.
thinking people fool
I think the easiest people to fool are ourselves. Fooling ourselves may even be a necessary precondition for fooling others.
gratitude limits capacity
My gratitude extends beyond the limits of my capacity to express it,
way encounters problem
An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.
civilization might emptiness
It was a truism that all civilizations were basically neurotic until they made contact with everybody else and found their place within the ever-changing meta-civilisation of other beings, because, until then, during the stage when they honestly believed they might be entirely alone in existence, all solo societies were possessed of both an inflated sense of their own importance and a kind of existential terror at the sheer scale and apparent emptiness of the universe.