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One should never mistake pattern for meaning.

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
Pattern
Patterns
Meaning
Mistake
Never

More quotes by 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Science fiction has its own history, its own legacy of what's been done, what's been superseded, what's so much part of the furniture it's practically part of the fabric now, what's become no more than a joke...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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I still have some of my old University essays, and I do still have my drawing book from primary year seven.
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
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My gratitude extends beyond the limits of my capacity to express it.
Iain Banks
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Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.
Iain Banks
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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.
Iain Banks
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Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in the utmost suspicion.
Iain Banks
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-Then what, Lededje asked, trying to keep her voice cold and not get caught up in the avatar´s obvious enthusiasm, is making you smile about a disaster? -Well, first, I didn´t cause it! Nothing to do with me, hands clean. Always a bonus.
Iain Banks
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It was the day my grandmother exploded.
Iain Banks
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There's an old Sysan saying that the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it.
Iain Banks
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I held my crotch, closed my eyes and repeated my secret catechism.
Iain Banks
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Truth, I have learned, differs for everybody. Just as no two people ever see a rainbow in exactly the same place - and yet both most certainly see it, while the person seemingly standing right underneath it does not see it at all - so truth is a question of where one stands, and the direction one is looking in at the time.
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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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.
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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In so much of politics you're not allowed to disagree with what's been agreed.
Iain Banks
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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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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.
Iain Banks
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I think we need politicians we need people who want to serve.
Iain Banks
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There has seldom if ever 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 simple fact there is never a scarcity of idiots.
Iain Banks