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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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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
Real
Writing
Make
Life
Whereas
Fiction
Trouble
Sense
Doesn

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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.
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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.
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I'm a devoted husband. That must strike you as totally deviant.
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The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others
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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
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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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I held my crotch, closed my eyes and repeated my secret catechism.
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I'm from out of town, he said breezily. This was true. He'd never been within a hundred light-years of the 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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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.
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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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Soon equates to good, later to worse, Uagen Zlepe, scholar. Therefore, immediacy.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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There are no gods, we are told, so I must make my own salvation.
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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
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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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...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.
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My gratitude extends beyond the limits of my capacity to express it.
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