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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.

Iain Banks

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Iain Banks
Age: 59 †
Born: 1954
Born: February 16
Died: 2013
Died: June 9
Author
Novelist
Philosopher
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Iain M. Banks
Iain Menzies Banks
Seemed
Ones
Answers
Knew
Enemy
Everybody
Better
Everything

More quotes by Iain Banks

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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.
Iain Banks
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Something in your voice tells me we approach the question of remuneration.
Iain Banks
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...and I confess that, like a child, I cry. Ah, self-pity I think we are at our most honest and sincere when we feel sorry for ourselves.
Iain Banks
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Soon equates to good, later to worse, Uagen Zlepe, scholar. Therefore, immediacy.
Iain Banks
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You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history
Iain Banks
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One of your American professors said that to study religion was merely to know the mind of man, but if one truly wanted to know the mind of God, you must study physics.
Iain Banks
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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
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In so much of politics you're not allowed to disagree with what's been agreed.
Iain Banks
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The truth is not always useful, not always good. It’s like putting your faith in water. Yes, we need the rain, but too much can sweep you away in a flood and drown you. Like all great natural, elemental forces, the truth needs to be channeled, managed, controlled and intelligently, morally allocated.
Iain Banks
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I deliberately keep myself apart from a lot of stuff I don't Tweet, I don't do Facebook, I don't blog, and that's largely because I spend my working life staring at a screen and hitting a keyboard, I am trying to cut down on that, not increase it.
Iain Banks
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A lot of what the 'Culture' is about is a reaction to all the science fiction I was reading in my very early teens.
Iain Banks
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Science fiction has its own history, its own legacy of what's been done, what's been superseded, what's so much part of the furniture it's practically part of the fabric now, what's become no more than a joke... and so on. It's just plain foolish, as well as comically arrogant, to ignore all this, to fail to do the most basic research.
Iain Banks
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Writing is like everything else: the more you do it the better you get. Don't try to perfect as you go along, just get to the end of the damn thing. Accept imperfections. Get it finished and then you can go back. If you try to polish every sentence there's a chance you'll never get past the first chapter.
Iain Banks
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If this goes badly and I make a crater, I want it named after me!
Iain Banks
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I am not being obtuse. You are being paranoid.
Iain Banks
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I enjoy it too much - even if I knew I'd never get a book published, I would still write. I enjoy the experience of getting thoughts and ideas and plots and characters organised into this narrative framework.
Iain Banks
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My gratitude extends beyond the limits of my capacity to express it.
Iain Banks
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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
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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.
Iain Banks
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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.
Iain Banks