Quotes from Iain Banks

I mean, nobody tells you sex is going to be so _noisy_, do they? ...

The music machine played away - far away - and when I started to understand the lyrics of a Cocteau Twins song, I knew I was wrecked.

I still don't understand fashion. Why do people dress up in new styles in the first place if they're only going to act all embarrassed and ashamed about them later?

Willy, one of the guys at the distillery, comes up with what Oliver and I agree is the best definition of what a 'dram' actually is: 'A measure of whisky that is pleasing to both guest and host.

it is an ocean of burning oil I am cast adrift upon, no sea's repose; I pass from waking agonies… to the semiconscious trance of torment in which the smaller, earlier, deeper rings of the brain know only that the nerves scream, the body aches, and there is no one to turn crying to for comfort.

Yes of course I know it's all a dream. Isn't everything?

It's like a sealed, forgotten chamber in me; I shan't feel complete until I've discovered its entrance.' 'Sounds like a tomb. Aren't you afraid of what you'll find in there?' 'It's a library; only the stupid and the evil are afraid of those.

I brought my face up and put my head back, baring my neck to the wind like a lover, to the rain like an offering.

You don't belong to her and she doesn't belong to you, but you're both part of each other; if she got up and left now and walked away and you never saw each other again for the rest of your lives, and you lived an ordinary waking life for another fifty years, even so on your deathbed you would know she was part of you.

The catechisms also tell the truth about who I am, what I want and how I feel, and it can be unsettling to hear yourself described as you have thought of yourself in your most honest and abject moods, just as it is humbling to hear what you have thought about in your most hopeful and unrealistic moments.

The madder people. A lot of them seem to be leaders of countries or religions or armies. The real loonies.

Hair on a man's head is like the opposite of salt in a dish; you can take it away but you can't add it in.

those retrospectively blessed dozen years lasted from the chilly, fevered Central European night of November 9th, 1989 to that bright morning on the Eastern Seaboard of American of September 11th, 2001. One event symbolized the lifted threat of a worldwide nuclear holocaust, something which had been hanging over humanity for nearly forty years, and so ended an age of idiocy. The other ushered in a new one.

There's this sloth in the jungle walking from one tree to another, and it's mugged by a gang of snails, and when the police ask the sloth if it could identify any of its attackers, it says, 'I don't know; it all happened so quickly...

jammed inside the bastard for three hours.'). And that bridge, the bridge . . . have to make a pilgrimage to

Probably the most blood came when I used a cheese grater on his knees.

That would require faith. I do not beliebe in faith. I believe it exists but I do not believe it works. I don't know what the rules are here; I can't risk throwing everything away on a long shot.

It's a library; only the stupid and the evil are afraid of those

something very unlikely happened which by sheer chance mattered more to him than anybody else it could have happened to.

To want more was not just childish, but cowardly, and somehow constpatory too. Death was change; it led to new chances, new vacancies, new niches and opportunities; it was not all loss.

Perhaps we think up our own destinies, and so in a sense deserve whatever happens to us, for not having had the wit to imagine something better.

Let's be clear: unless I have profoundly misunderstood its position, I pretty much despise American Libertarianism. Have these people seriously looked at the problems of the world and thought, 'Hmm, what we need here is a bit more selfishness'? . . . I beg to differ.

even though he is mad and I am sane.

Future became Present, Present became Past. A truth so banal, so obvious and accepted that he had somehow managed to ignore it before.