Quote

...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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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
Feel
Confess
Feels
Sincere
Children
Pity
Think
Cry
Thinking
Sorry
Like
Honest
Child
Self

More quotes by 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.
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There's an old Sysan saying that the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it.
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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.
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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.
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Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.
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Hersesy is denying the word of God, and the word of God is much more reliably expressed in the natural world as it’s revealed through reason and science than in what I have heard described wonderfully as “the giant book of Jewish fairy stories.
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There are no gods, we are told, so I must make my own salvation.
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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.
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I love writing and can't imagine not being able to do it. I want an easy life and if it had been difficult I wouldn't be doing it. I do admire writers who do it even though it costs them.
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Even galaxy-spanning anarchist utopias of stupefying full-spectrum civilisational power have turf wars within their unacknowledged militaries.
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If this goes badly and I make a crater, I want it named after me!
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I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!
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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.
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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.
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Smell is a very animal thing, almost reptilian, where the more cerebral things like reading less so.
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What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead?
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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.
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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.
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I think the future stopped looking American when you think back to Blade Runner and Neuromancer, when it started to look more Japanese.
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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.
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