Quotes from Iain Banks

My enemy is twice dead, and I still have him.

I killed little Esmerelda because I felt I owed it to myself and to the world in general. I had, after all, accounted for two male children and thus done womankind something of a statistical favour. If I really had the courage of my convictions, I reasoned, I ought to redress the balance at least slightly. My cousin was simply the easiest and most obvious target.

There is only darkness, starless and complete. The waves glitter like a million dull knives.

I held my crotch, closed my eyes and repeated my secret catechism.

These were the days of fond promise, when the world was very small and there wasstill magic in it. He told them stories o fthe Secret Mountain and the Sound that could be Seen, of the Forest drowned by Sand and the trees that were time-stilled waters (...) Then, every day was a week, each month a year. A season was a decade, and every year a life.

This is not a long bridge, but it goes on for ever. I am not far from the bank, but I will never get there. I walk but I never move. Fast or slow, running, turning, doubling back, jumping, throwing myself or stopping; nothing makes any difference.

Bright morning comes; the bloody-fingered dawn with zealous light sets seas of air ablaze and bends to earth another false beginning. My eyes open like cornflowers, stick, crusted with their own stale dew, then take that light.

It occurred to me then, as it has before, that that is what men are really for. Both sexes can do one thing specially well; women can give birth and men can kill.

I switched the light out again. The room was totally dark, not even the starlight showing while my eyes adjusted. Perhaps I would ask for one of those LED alarm radios, though I'm very fond of my old brass alarm clock. Once I tied a wasp tot the striking-surface of each of the copper-coloured bells on top, where the little hammer would hit them in the morning when the alarm went off. I always wake up before the alarm goes, so I got to watch.

I wonder if – as I tumble towards the waves – I'll have time to get the iPhone out, hit Facebook and change my status to 'Dead'.

The flames had passed over those flattened blades and consumed their heather neighbours on either side while they themselves had remained, made proof against the blaze and guaranteed their stark survival just by their earlier oppression.

It made me feel good to know that I could see him and he couldn't see me, and that I was aware and fully conscious and he wasn't

like when I walk along a pavement in Porteneil and I accidentally scuff one heel on a paving stone. I have to scuff the other foot as well, with as near as possible the same weight, to feel good again.

It was a war scripted by Heller from a story by Orwell, and somebody would be bombing their own airfield before too long, no doubt.

All I said was that I thought it was a judgement from God that Blyth had first lost his leg and then had the replacement become the instrument of his downfall. All because of the rabbits. Eric, who was going through a religious phase at the time which I suppose I was to some extent copying, thought this was a terrible thing to say; God wasn't like that. I said the one I believed in was.

It was just a stage I was going through.

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.

Peddle one of the least harmful drugs humanity's ever discovered, and you get twenty years. Peddle something that kills a hundred thousand a year... and you get a knighthood.

He was one of those men ... who know in their hearts that for all their edgy, belligerent hardness they are just unhappy kids, emotional retards.

Oh dear. I do believe this is self-pity. I am imagining myself dramatically dead, tragically taken from you and even more lamentably forgotten. What dreadful clichés war and social strife reduces us to, and how powerful the effect must be, if even I am so infected. I think I must pull myself together.

Och, stop being so sensitive, Prentice; it isn't much fun getting old. One of the few pleasures that do come your way is to speak your mind... Certainly annoying your relatives is enjoyable too, but I expected better of you.

I'm doing fine. I eat dogs! Heh heh heh!' I

Perhaps he just got fed up acting normal and decided to act crazy instead, and they locked him up because he went too far.

It was as if some magnetic repulsion, which before had kept our two carriages from meeting and passing, had now been reversed, and so sucked me inexorably forward, drawing me towards something my heart made clear I feared - or should fear - utterly, in the way some people are fatally attracted towards an abyss while standing on its very edge.