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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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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
Opinion
Moral
Must
Niceties
Always
Constraints
Guides
Morality
Masters
Normal

More quotes by Iain Banks

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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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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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Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.
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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.
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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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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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Science fiction has its own history, its own legacy of what's been done, what's been superseded, what's so much part of the furniture it's practically part of the fabric now, what's become no more than a joke...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
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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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I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!
Iain Banks
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I held my crotch, closed my eyes and repeated my secret catechism.
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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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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Something in your voice tells me we approach the question of remuneration.
Iain Banks
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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.
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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If this goes badly and I make a crater, I want it named after me!
Iain Banks
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What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead?
Iain Banks
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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
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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One of your American professors said that to study religion was merely to know the mind of man, but if one truly wanted to know the mind of God, you must study physics.
Iain Banks