Scottish author (1954-2013)
There was nothing worse ... than a loser who'd made it. It was just part of the way things worked--part of the complexity of life ... that sometimes somebody who absolutely deserved nothing more than to be one of the downtrodden, the oppressed, the dregs of society, lucked out into a position of wealth, power and admiration. At least people who were natural winners knew how to carry themselves in their pomp, whether their ascendancy had come through the luck of being born rich and powerful or the luck of being born ambitious and capable. Losers who'd made it always let the side down.... Their only use ... was as examples to be held up to those who complained about their lack of status or money or control over their lives: look, if this idiot can achieve something, so can anybody, so can you. So stop whining about being exploited and work harder.
IAIN M. BANKS
Surface Detail
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.
IAIN M. BANKS
Consider Phlebas
I am, as I have always been, of the opinion that while the niceties of normal moral constraints should be our guides, they must not be our masters.
IAIN M. BANKS
Excession
What was glory but something that reduced the more there were of you to share it?
IAIN M. BANKS
Surface Detail
One should never regret one's excesses, only one's failures of nerve.
IAIN M. BANKS
The Hydrogen Sonata
All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of its rules.
IAIN M. BANKS
The Player of Games
If this goes badly and I make a crater, I want it named after me!
IAIN M. BANKS
Against a Dark Background
In all the human societies we have ever reviewed, in every age and every state, there has seldom if ever been a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots.
IAIN M. BANKS
Use of Weapons
All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now. All the rest was fantasy.
IAIN M. BANKS
Surface Detail
There came a point when if a conspiracy was that powerful and subtle it became pointless to worry about it.
IAIN M. BANKS
Excession
The bomb lives only as it is falling.
IAIN M. BANKS
Use of Weapons
Empathize with stupidity and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot.
IAIN M. BANKS
Consider Phlebas
There were few better ways of knocking the fight out of people than by convincing them that life was a joke, a contrivance under somebody else's ultimate control, and nothing of what they thought or did really mattered.
IAIN M. BANKS
Surface Detail
As a writer – it must be the same for actors – you're used to dealing with the idea of death and all the big questions. Unless you're writing purely for five-year-olds, about bunnies, you're going to have to think about death. Your characters will die and people will live on afterwards who cared about them. You need to be able to empathise with them. Of course, we all go through it; we all have people close to us die. But as a writer you really have to think it through properly, or it'll all ring false. It's almost one of the perks of the trade that you're forced to think about that stuff fairly deeply. So maybe when it comes along in real life, you're slightly better prepared to deal with it.
IAIN M. BANKS
"Iain Banks: The Final Interview,", The Guardian, June 14, 2013
The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't. It's incredibly annoying for us scribblers.
IAIN M. BANKS
"Iain Banks: The Final Interview,", The Guardian, June 14, 2013
Perdition awaits at the end of a road constructed entirely from good intentions, the devil emerges from the details and hell abides in the small print.
IAIN M. BANKS
Transition
I'm saying with very few exceptions nothing lasts forever, and amongst those exceptions, no work or thought of man is numbered.
IAIN M. BANKS
Use of Weapons
Beauty is something that disappears when you try to define it.
IAIN M. BANKS
The State of the Art
Us with our busy, busy little lives, finding no better way to pass our years than in competitive disdain.
IAIN M. BANKS
Consider Phlebas
We are a race prone to monsters ... and when we produce one we worship it.
IAIN M. BANKS
Against a Dark Background