Quotes from Iain Banks

You're a wicked man." "Thank you. It's taken years of diligent practice.

"You like music, Mr. Gurgeh?" Hamin asked, leaning over to the man. Gurgeh nodded. "Well, a little does no harm."

In so much of politics you're not allowed to disagree with what's been agreed.

You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history

I remember being shocked when I discovered some of my school pals didn't have books in their homes. I thought it was like not having oxygen, or hot water.

There are no gods, we are told, so I must make my own salvation.

'Dead Air' is full of rants; it's a rant-based book. Yes, it's self-indulgence. I plead guilty; mea culpa.

I still find it hard to understand that anyone could argue that you can't have machines that exhibit consciousness.

Even galaxy-spanning anarchist utopias of stupefying full-spectrum civilisational power have turf wars within their unacknowledged militaries.

Maybe it wasn't anything remotely to do with religion, mysticism or metaphilosophy after all; maybe it was more banal; maybe it was just...accounting.

A lot of what the 'Culture' is about is a reaction to all the science fiction I was reading in my very early teens.

There's an old Sysan saying that the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it.

Torture is such a slippery slope; as soon as you allow a society or any legal system to do that, almost instantly you get a situation where people are being tortured for very trivial reasons.

Even in my side of the world, I've been in publishing for what, 25 or 26 years, and it's gone from being a gentlemen's club to being a few big players, and it's very corporatised.

There is a quite a lot of effort involved but I find action sequences some of the quickest to write and the most fun.

I don't really do themes. I might accidentally, but themes are an emergent phenomena of the writing of the book, of just trying to get a story out there.

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.

Technology determines the possibilities of society. It doesn't matter whether you start out from a fascist state or a communist state or a free-market state

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.

As a writer, you get to play, you get alter time, you get to come up with the smart lines and the clever comebacks you wish you'd thought of.

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.

I'm not a great believer in awards-of course the fact that I've never won one has nothing to do with it at all!

Look at these humans! How could such glacial slowness even be called life? An age could pass, virtual empires rise and fall in the time they took to open their mouths to utter some new inanity!

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.