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Iain Banks Quotes

Iain Banks was 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 .

After the publication and success of The Wasp Factory , Banks began to write on a full-time basis. His first science fiction book, Consider Phlebas, was released in 1987, marking the start of the Culture series. His books have been adapted for theatre, radio and television. In 2008, The Times named Banks in their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". In April 2013, Banks announced that he had inoperable cancer and was unlikely to live beyond a year. He died on 9 June 2013. Wikipedia  

✵ 16. February 1954 – 9. June 2013
Iain Banks photo

Works

Culture series
Iain Banks
The Wasp Factory
Transition
Transition
Iain Banks
Culture series
Iain Banks
The Wasp Factory
Transition
Transition
Iain Banks
Iain Banks: 139 quotes2 likes

Famous Iain Banks Quotes

“You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history”

Iain Banks

“A guilty system recognizes no innocents.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, The Player of Games (1988), Chapter 2 “Imperium” (p. 215).
Context: A guilty system recognizes no innocents. As with any power apparatus which thinks everybody’s either for it or against it, we’re against it. You would be too, if you thought about it. The very way you think places you among its enemies. This might not be your fault, because every society imposes some of its values on those raised within it, but the point is that some societies try to maximize that effect, and some try to minimize it. You come from one of the latter and you’re being asked to explain yourself to one of the former. Prevarication will be more difficult than you imagine; neutrality is probably impossible. You cannot choose not to have the politics you do; they are not some separate set of entities somehow detachable from the rest of your being; they are a function of your existence. I know that and they know that; you had better accept it.

“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.”

Iain Banks book Excession

Source: Excession

“One should never mistake pattern for meaning.”

Iain Banks book The Hydrogen Sonata

Source: The Hydrogen Sonata

Iain Banks Quotes about people

“I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.”

Iain Banks book Use of Weapons

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter II (p. 417).
Context: He shrugged. “Whatever.”
“Aw, Darac, come on; argue, dammit.”
“I don’t believe in argument,” he said, looking out into the darkness (and saw a towering ship, a capital ship, ringed with its layers and levels of armament and armor, dark against the dusk light, but not dead).
“You don’t?” Erens said, genuinely surprised. “Shit, and I thought I was the cynical one.”
“It’s not cynicism,” he said flatly. “I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.”
“Oh well, thank you.”
“It’s comforting, I suppose.” He watched the stars wheel, like absurdly slow shells seen at night: rising, peaking, falling...(And reminded himself that the stars too would explode, perhaps, one day.) “Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed,” he said. “And I think they know in their hearts that other people are just the same, and one of the reasons people become angry when they argue is that they realize just that, as they trot out their excuses.”
“Excuses, eh? Well, if this ain’t cynicism, what is?” Erens snorted.
“Yes, excuses,” he said, with what Erens thought might just have been a trace of bitterness. “I strongly suspect the things people believe in are usually just what they instinctively feel is right; the excuses, the justifications, the things you’re supposed to argue about, come later. They’re the least important part of the belief. That’s why you can destroy them, win an argument, prove the other person wrong, and still they believe what they did in the first place.” He looked at Erens. “You’ve attacked the wrong thing.”

“Sometimes the thoughts and feelings I had didn't really agree with each other, so I decided I must be lots of different people inside my brain.”

Iain Banks book The Wasp Factory

Source: The Wasp Factory

“Looking at me, you'd never guess I'd killed three people. It isn't fair.”

Iain Banks book The Wasp Factory

Source: The Wasp Factory

“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.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 8 “Killing Time” section V (p. 261).

““One of the advantages of having laws is the pleasure one may take in breaking them. We here are not children, Mr. Gurgeh.” Hamin waved the pipestem round the tables of people. “Rules and laws exist only because we take pleasure in doing what they forbid, but as long as most of the people obey such proscriptions most of the time, they have done their job; blind obedience would imply we are—ha!”—Hamin chuckled and pointed at the drone with the pipe—“no more than robots!””

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, The Player of Games (1988), Chapter 2 (p. 279).

“I think the easiest people to fool are ourselves. Fooling ourselves may even be a necessary precondition for fooling others.”

Iain Banks book The Bridge

Source: The Bridge

Iain Banks Quotes about thinking

“Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Consider Phlebas (1987), Chapter 2 “The Hand of God 137” (p. 27).

“It’s as if I drifted into this situation. I didn’t ever think about fighting or doing anything risky at all, not until the war came along. I agreed it was necessary, but that seemed obvious; everybody thought so, everybody I knew, anyway. And volunteering, agreeing to take part; that too seemed… natural. I knew I might die, but I was prepared to risk that; it was almost romantic. Somehow it never occurred to me that it might entail privation and suffering. Am I as stupid as those throughout history—those I’ve always despised and pitied—who’ve marched off to war, heads full of noble notions and expectations of easy glory, only to die screaming and torn in the mud?”

Iain Banks

“Descendant” (p. 40)
Short fiction, The State of the Art (1991)

““I think I know the real reason.”
“Which is?”
“Alcohol in the dust clouds. Goddamn stuff is everywhere. Any lousy species ever invents the telescope and the spectroscope and starts looking in between the stars, what do they find?” He knocked the glass on the table. “Loads of stuff, but much of it alcohol.” He drank from the glass. “Humanoids are the galaxy’s way of trying to get rid of all that alcohol.””

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter IX (p. 148).

““Nothing is sacred to you, Mr. Munro. You base your beliefs on the products of human thought, so it could hardly be otherwise. You might believe in certain things, but you do not have faith. That comes with submission to the force of divine revelation.”
“So, because I don’t have what I think of as superstitions, because I believe we just happen to exist, and believe in… science, evolution, whatever; I’m not as… worthy as somebody who has faith in an ancient book and a cruel, desert God?””

Iain Banks

“Piece” (p. 73)
Short fiction, The State of the Art (1991)

“The youth was a cretin, and didn’t even realize that he was.
He could think of no more disastrous combination.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter V (p. 303).

“I’ve been thinking about the war a lot recently, and I think I’ve decided it’s wrong. We are defeating ourselves in waging it, will destroy ourselves by winning it.”

Iain Banks

“Descendant” (p. 46)
Short fiction, The State of the Art (1991)

Iain Banks: Trending quotes

“All our lives are symbols. Everything we do is part of a pattern we have at least some say in. The strong make their own patterns and influence other people's, the weak have their courses mapped out for them. The weak and the unlucky, and the stupid.”

Iain Banks book The Wasp Factory

Source: The Wasp Factory

“It was the day my grandmother exploded.”

Iain Banks book The Crow Road

Source: The Crow Road

“The underlying point held; 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 Banks book Consider Phlebas

Source: Culture series, Consider Phlebas (1987), Chapter 4 “Temple of Light” (p. 96).

Iain Banks Quotes

“After doing extensive research, I can definitely tell you that single malt whiskies are good to drink.”

Iain Banks Raw Spirit

Source: Raw Spirit

“There's an old Sysan saying that the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it.”

Iain Banks book Look to Windward

Source: Look to Windward

“Something in your voice tells me we approach the question of remuneration.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Consider Phlebas (1987), Chapter 2 “The Hand of God 137” (p. 20).

“The news team, and Hamin, seemed well pleased. “You should have been an actor, Jernau Gurgeh,” Hamin told him.
Gurgeh assumed this was intended as a compliment.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, The Player of Games (1988), Chapter 3 “Machina Ex Machina” (p. 306).

“While the forces of repression need to win every time, the progressive elements need only triumph once.”

Iain Banks

“A Few Notes on the Culture” (p. 169)
Short fiction, The State of the Art (1991)

“There are no gods, we are told, so I must make my own salvation.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter V (p. 303).

“What I know was passed to me by others, and so must surrender the toll which information tends to pay when it passes through the minds and memories of others.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 23 (p. 371)

““So it’s false.”
“What isn’t?”
“Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.””

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, The Player of Games (1988), Chapter 1 “Culture Plate” (p. 5).

“Pity they didn’t devote a little more ingenuity to staying alive rather than conducting mass slaughter as efficiently as possible.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Consider Phlebas (1987), Chapter 4 “Temple of Light” (p. 96).

“Tell me, suit, don’t you wonder if it’s all worth it?’
“If what’s all worth what?” it says, and I can hear that condescending tone in its voice again.
“You know; living. Is it worth all the… bother?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No, I don’t ever wonder about it.”
“Why not?” I’m keeping my questions short as we walk, conserving energy and breath.
“I don’t need to wonder about that. It’s not important.”

Iain Banks

“Not important?”
“It’s an irrelevant question. We live; that’s enough.”
“Descendant” (p. 44)
Short fiction, The State of the Art (1991)

““You’re a wicked man.”
“Thank you. It’s taken years of diligent practice.””

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter Eleven (p. 355).

“The sky was aquamarine, stroked with clouds. She could smell the grass and taste the scent of small, crushed flowers. She looked back up over her forehead at the gray-black wall towering behind her, and wondered if the castle had ever been attacked on days like this. Did the sky seem so limitless, the waters of the straits so fresh and clean, the flowers so bright and fragrant, when men fought and screamed, hacked and staggered and fell and watched their blood mat the grass?
Mists and dusk, rain and lowering cloud seemed the better background; clothes to cover the shame of battle.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter Two (pp. 50-51).

“One does not spy on one’s own people,” ZeSpiole informed him. “One has, rather, conduits of communication which lead to the common man.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 18 (p. 295)

““These people have successfully incorporated a belief in your martial prowess into their religion; how can you deny them?”
“Believe me, it would be easy.””

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter Twelve (p. 390).

“Sex was an infringement, an attack, an invasion; there was no other way he could see it; every act, however magical and intensely enjoyed, and however willingly conducted, seemed to carry a harmonic of rapacity. He took her, and however much she gained in provoked pleasure and in his own increasing love, she was still the one that suffered the act, had it played out upon her and inside her. He was aware of the absurdity of trying too hard to develop the comparison between sex and war; he had been laughed out of several embarrassing situations trying to do so (“Zakalwe,” she would say when he tried to explain some of this, and she would put her cool slim fingers behind his neck and stare out from the rambunctious black tangle of her hair. “You have serious problems.””

Iain Banks Culture series

She would smile), But the feelings, the acts, the structure of the two were to him so close, so self-evidently akin, that such a reaction only forced him deeper into his confusion.
Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter IX (pp. 144-145).

“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.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 5 “Kiss the Blade” section IV (p. 151).

“It’s very nearly 1989 but it’s midnight in the Dark Ages just the thickness of a book away, the thickness of a skull away; just the turn of a page away.”

Iain Banks

“Piece” (p. 74)
Short fiction, The State of the Art (1991)

“Quettil, it doesn’t matter,” the King said airily, waving one hand. “I prefer accuracy to flattery.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 9 (p. 158)

“He knew in his heart that there was a relief in not being listened to, sometimes. Power meant responsibility. Advice unacted upon almost always might have been right, and in the working out of whatever plan was followed, there was anyway always blood; better it was on their hands. The good soldier did as he was told, and if he had any sense at all volunteered for nothing, especially promotion.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter XII (p. 65).

““You like music, Mr. Gurgeh?” Hamin asked, leaning over to the man.
Gurgeh nodded. “Well, a little does no harm.””

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, The Player of Games (1988), Chapter 2 (p. 277).

“Did the Doctor really imagine that everbody went around believing different things? One believed what one was told to believe, what it made sense to believe. Unless one was a foreigner, of course, or a philosopher.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 7 (pp. 125-126)

“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.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 11 “Regarding Gravious” section VI (p. 364).

““I’m very sorry,” the drone said, without a trace of contrition.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, The Player of Games (1988), Chapter 3 (p. 308).

“The combination of modern ordnance and outdated tactics had, as usual, created enormous casualties on both sides.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 3 “Uninvited Guests” section I (p. 66).

“He had to give orders that meant men died, and sometimes sacrifice hundreds, thousands of them, knowingly sending them to their near-certain deaths, just to secure some important position or goal, or protect some vital position. And always, whether they liked it or not, the civilians suffered too; the very people they both claimed to be fighting for made up perhaps the bulk of the casualties in their bloody struggle.
He had tried to stop it, tried to bargain, from the beginning, but neither side wanted peace on anything except its own terms, and he had no real political power, and so had had to fight.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter I (p. 443).

“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.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 4 “Dependency Principle” section V (p. 129).

“What they had talked themselves into, they could be silent out of.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter IX (p. 157).

“An excess of boringness does not make a thing interesting except in the driest academic sense. A place is not boring if you have to look really hard for something which is interesting. If there is absolutely nothing interesting about any particular place, then that is a perfectly interesting and quintessentially un-boring place.”

Iain Banks

“State of the Art” (p. 112)
Short fiction, The State of the Art (1991)

“There came a point when if a conspiracy was that powerful and subtle it became pointless to worry about it.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 5 “Kiss the Blade” section III (p. 149).

“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.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 11 “Regarding Gravious” section VI (p. 365).

“Perhaps my certainty is misplaced.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Epilogue (p. 399)
Culture series, Inversions (1998)

“Tishlin’s dubious look indicated he wasn’t totally convinced this phrase contributed enormously to the information-carrying capacity of the language.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 2 “Not Invented Here” section II (p. 58).

“There is always the right of the strong to take the weak and the rich to take the poor and the powerful to take those who have no power. UrLeyn may have written down our laws and changed a few of them, but the laws that still bind us to the animals cut the deepest. Men compete for power, they strut and parade and they impress their fellows with their possessions and they take the women they can. None of that has changed. They may use weapons other than their hands and teeth, they may use other men and they may express their dominance in money, not other symbols of power and glamour, but…”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 20 (p. 335)

“Beauty is something that disappears when you try to define it.”

Iain Banks

Source: Short fiction, The State of the Art (1991) “State of the Art” (p. 128)

“Some of us prefer history to legends, lady,” DeWar said heavily, “and sometimes everybody can be wrong.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 2 (p. 37)

“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.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Consider Phlebas (1987), Chapter 2 “The Hand of God 137” (p. 32).

“You can draw the blinds in a brothel, but people still know what you’re doing.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 4 (p. 69)

“If you have any helpful suggestions I’d be pleased to hear them. If all you can do is make snide insinuations then it would probably benefit all concerned if you bestowed the fruits of your prodigious wit on someone with the spare time to give them the consideration they doubtless deserve.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 7 “Tier” section III (p. 219).

“Look at these humans! How could such glacial slowness even be called life? An age could pass, virtual empires rise and fall in the time they took to open their mouths to utter some new inanity!”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 7 “Tier” section II (p. 212).

“We created something a little closer to perfection than ourselves; maybe that’s the only way to progress. Let them try to do the same. I doubt they can, so they will always be less as well as more than us. It’s all just a sum, a whispered piece of figuring lost in the empty blizzards of white noise howling through the universe, a brief oasis in an infinite desert, a freak bit of working out in which we have transcended ourselves, and they are only the remainder.”

Iain Banks

“Descendant” (pp. 47-48)
Short fiction, The State of the Art (1991)

“Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.”

Iain Banks

“Piece” (p. 75)
Short fiction, The State of the Art (1991)

“Empires are synonymous with centralized—if occasionally schismatized—hierarchical power structures in which influence is restricted to an economically privileged class retaining its advantages through—usually—a judicious use of oppression and skilled manipulation of both the society’s information dissemination systems and its lesser—as a rule nominally independent—power systems. In short, it’s all about dominance.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, The Player of Games (1988), Chapter 1 (p. 91).

“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 Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, The Player of Games (1988), Chapter 1 (p. 48).

““Don’t you have a religion?” Dorolow asked Horza.
“Yes,” he replied, not taking his eyes away from the screen on the wall above the end of the main mess-room table. “My survival.””

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Consider Phlebas (1987), Chapter 5 “Megaship” (p. 102).

“Well, he sighed to no one in particular, and looked up into yet another alien sky. Here we are again.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter Six (p. 178).

“Even the pain of what had felt on occasion like an irretrievably broken heart had consistently proved less lasting than she’d initially imagined and expected; the revelation that a boy’s taste was so grotesquely deficient he could prefer somebody else to her always reduced both the intensity and the duration of the anguish her heart demanded be endured to mark such a loss of regard.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 6 “Pittance” section III (p. 180).

“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 Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter Thirteen (p. 434).

““Is all this serious?” Gurgeh said, turning, amused, from the screen to the drone.
“Deadly serious,” Flere-Imsaho told him.
Gurgeh laughed and shook his head. He thought the common people must be remarkably stupid if they believed all this nonsense.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, The Player of Games (1988), Chapter 2 (p. 225).

“Of course, she does seem to be a rather good doctor. At the very least she has done the King no obvious harm, and that in my experience is far more than one might reasonably expect from a court physician.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 7 (p. 130)

“What is all your studying worth, all your learning, all your knowledge, if it doesn’t lead to wisdom? And what’s wisdom but knowing what is right, and what is the right thing to do?”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter Ten (p. 316).

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