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
bits easier gets longer pick scottish-writer stories
I just pick up my stories as I amble along, little bits of this, little bits of that. It gets easier the longer you've been at it.
weapons
Tell me, what is happiness? - Use of Weapons
atheist cancer thinking
I just took [my cancer diagnosis] as bad luck, basically. It did strike me almost immediately, my atheist sort of thing kicked in and I thought "ha, if I was a God-botherer, I'd be thinking, why me God? What have I done to deserve this?" and I thought at least I'm free of that, at least I can simply treat it as bad luck and get on with it.
technology matter communist
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
paranoid
I am not being obtuse. You are being paranoid.
accounting mysticism
Maybe it wasn't anything remotely to do with religion, mysticism or metaphilosophy after all; maybe it was more banal; maybe it was just...accounting.
ocean nonsense devalue
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.
light-years towns said
I'm from out of town," he said breezily. This was true. He'd never been within a hundred light-years of the place.
tactics sides usual
The combination of modern ordnance and outdated tactics had, as usual, created enormous casualties on both sides.
people legal-system slippery-slope
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.
possibility-of-change development definitions
Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change... If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual's circumstances — and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse — then you don't have life after death; you just have death.
time auras sides
Mr Blawke always reminded me of a heron; I'm not sure why. Something to do with a sense of rapacious stillness, perhaps, and also the aura of one who knows time is on his side.
mistake patterns should
One should never mistake pattern for meaning.
immediacy scholar
Soon equates to good, later to worse, Uagen Zlepe, scholar. Therefore, immediacy.