Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Think
Clear
Thinking
Face
Faces
Unhurried
Eye
Bare
Fear
Calm
Night
Draws
Thought
Sight
Made
Dark

More quotes by Iain Banks

Image
Escape is a consumer goods like another
Iain Banks
Image
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
Image
Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in the utmost suspicion.
Iain Banks
Image
Science fiction has its own history, its own legacy of what's been done, what's been superseded, what's so much part of the furniture it's practically part of the fabric now, what's become no more than a joke...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
Image
What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead?
Iain Banks
Image
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.
Iain Banks
Image
One should never mistake pattern for meaning.
Iain Banks
Image
You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history
Iain Banks
Image
You're a wicked man. Thank you. It's taken years of diligent practice.
Iain Banks
Image
...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
Image
I am not being obtuse. You are being paranoid.
Iain Banks
Image
You have to have something worth saying and then the ability to say it- writing's a double skill, really.
Iain Banks
Image
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
Image
Even galaxy-spanning anarchist utopias of stupefying full-spectrum civilisational power have turf wars within their unacknowledged militaries.
Iain Banks
Image
I'm from out of town, he said breezily. This was true. He'd never been within a hundred light-years of the place.
Iain Banks
Image
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
Image
I held my crotch, closed my eyes and repeated my secret catechism.
Iain Banks
Image
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
Image
It's a library, only the stupid or the evil are afraid of those
Iain Banks
Image
Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.
Iain Banks