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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
Always
Constraints
Guides
Morality
Masters
Normal
Opinion
Moral
Must
Niceties

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Soon equates to good, later to worse, Uagen Zlepe, scholar. Therefore, immediacy.
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If this goes badly and I make a crater, I want it named after me!
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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There has seldom if ever a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this simple fact there is never a scarcity of idiots.
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In so much of politics you're not allowed to disagree with what's been agreed.
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The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.
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Well, he sighed to no one in particular, and looked up into yet another alien sky. Here we are again.
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You're a wicked man. Thank you. It's taken years of diligent practice.
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I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!
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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.
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It was the day my grandmother exploded.
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A guilty system recognizes no innocents.
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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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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.
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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.
Iain Banks