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Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.

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
Skills
Intellectual
Exercise
Feeling
Feelings
Human
Humans
Skill
Achievement

More quotes by 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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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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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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...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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It was the day my grandmother exploded.
Iain Banks
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It's a library, only the stupid or the evil are afraid of those
Iain Banks
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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.
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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I think the future stopped looking American when you think back to Blade Runner and Neuromancer, when it started to look more Japanese.
Iain Banks
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One should never mistake pattern for meaning.
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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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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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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Soon equates to good, later to worse, Uagen Zlepe, scholar. Therefore, immediacy.
Iain Banks
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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.
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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Something in your voice tells me we approach the question of remuneration.
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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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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There's an old Sysan saying that the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it.
Iain Banks