Iain M. Banks Quotes

“I can understand that people want to feel special and important and so on, but that self-obsession seems a bit pathetic somehow. Not being able to accept that you're just this collection of cells, intelligent to whatever degree, capable of feeling emotion to whatever degree, for a limited amount of time and so on, on this tiny little rock orbiting this not particularly important sun in one of just 400m galaxies, and whatever other levels of reality there might be via something like brane-theory [of multiple dimensions] … really, it's not about you. It's what religion does with this drive for acknowledgement of self-importance that really gets up my nose. 'Yeah, yeah, your individual consciousness is so important to the universe that it must be preserved at all costs' – oh, please. Do try to get a grip of something other than your self-obsession. How Californian. The idea that at all costs, no matter what, it always has to be all about you. Well, I think not.”

“Elsewhere are two letters that were never sent, because of pride, each a declaration of love that would’ve changed lives”

“The point is: what happens in heaven?''Unknowable wonderfulness?' 'Nonsense. The answer is nothing. Nothing can happen because if something happens, in fact if something can happen, then it doesn't represent eternity. Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change.''If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual's circumstances - and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse - then you don't have life after death; you just have death.”

“Here they have no time for the fine gracesof poetry, unless it freely growsin deep compulsion, like water in the well,woven into the texture of the soilin a strong pattern.”

“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.”

“The world changes, but I want that change to be necessary or respectful of what has happened before. Everything changes, and that's quite right.”

“In Shakespeare, unique individuals repudiate the stereotypes demanded by the structure of the play: Shylock commands our sympathy, Barnardine refuses to be hanged. Individuals trump the category.”

“The imperial vastness of late Roman architecture was made possible by the invention of concrete.”

“My point has always been that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, science fiction has been the most important genre there is.”

“The nature of creativity is to make space for things to happen... We can drive it out with our busyness and plans.”