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Science fiction is trying to find alternative ways of looking at realities.

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
Fiction
Ways
Looking
Science
Reality
Find
Realities
Trying
Alternative
Way
Alternatives

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.
Iain Banks
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Well, he sighed to no one in particular, and looked up into yet another alien sky. Here we are again.
Iain Banks
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I held my crotch, closed my eyes and repeated my secret catechism.
Iain Banks
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My gratitude extends beyond the limits of my capacity to express it.
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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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As long as a film stays unmade, the book is entirely yours, it belongs to the writer. As soon as you make it into a film, suddenly more people see it than have ever read the book.
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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Soon equates to good, later to worse, Uagen Zlepe, scholar. Therefore, immediacy.
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I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!
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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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In so much of politics you're not allowed to disagree with what's been agreed.
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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Even galaxy-spanning anarchist utopias of stupefying full-spectrum civilisational power have turf wars within their unacknowledged militaries.
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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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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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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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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Smell is a very animal thing, almost reptilian, where the more cerebral things like reading less so.
Iain Banks
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A guilty system recognizes no innocents.
Iain Banks
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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.
Iain Banks