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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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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
Crater
Craters
Named
Badly
Goes
Make

More quotes by Iain Banks

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I'm saying with very few exceptions nothing lasts forever, and among those exceptions, no work or thought of man is numbered.
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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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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My gratitude extends beyond the limits of my capacity to express it.
Iain Banks
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Most mainstream male fiction is littered with heroines, and female characters are basically so great, you want to fall in love with them.
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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You have to have something worth saying and then the ability to say it- writing's a double skill, really.
Iain Banks
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Dead Air' is full of rants it's a rant-based book. Yes, it's self-indulgence. I plead guilty mea culpa.
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
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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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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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As a writer, you get to play, you get alter time, you get to come up with the smart lines and the clever comebacks you wish you'd thought of.
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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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 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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Here, in the bare dark face of night A calm unhurried eye draws sight We see in what we think we fear The cloudings of our thought made clear
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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The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.
Iain Banks
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Something in your voice tells me we approach the question of remuneration.
Iain Banks
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I held my crotch, closed my eyes and repeated my secret catechism.
Iain Banks