Iain Banks

• “There is a saying that we provide the machines with an end, and they provide us with the means.”

• “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!”

• “Just as I need never wonder what it is like to die, so I need never wonder what it is like to kill, Ziller, because I have done it, and it is a wasteful, graceless, worthless and hateful thing to have to do.”

• “On the other hand it could have been worse. And arguably one way of making it worse would be to admit just how badly things had actually gone.”

• “Gadfium found these meetings exasperating; they were supposed to keep people up to date with developments and help facilitate actions which might be of use in the current emergency, but so far all they ever seemed to do was pander to some of the attendees’ feelings of self-importance and produce vast amounts of talk that substituted for deeds rather than leading to them.”

• “If you are going to write what a friend of a friend once called 'Made up space shit', then if it's going to have any ring of truth that means sometimes some of the horrible characters get to live, and for there to be any sense of jeopardy, especially in future novels, the good people have to die. Sometimes.”

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.

Iain Banks across IJR