218 Quotes by Iain Banks

You get so caught up in what you’re writing – action sequences tend to do that more than anything else because you’re living it, and feeling for your characters.

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.

It looks perverted and wasteful to us, but then one thing that empires are not about is the efficient use of resources and the spread of happiness; both are typically accomplished despite the economic short-circuiting – corruption and favoritism, mostly – endemic to the system.

All our lives are symbols. Everything we do is part of a pattern we have at least some say in. The strong make their own patterns and influence other people’s, the weak have their courses mapped out for them. The weak and the unlucky, and the stupid.

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?

Escape is a commodity like anything else.

The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn’t.

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

There are times when you can’t do the sensible thing, when you can’t act like a responsible adult at all; you just have to do whatever insane thing comes into your head. When bad people do it they end up murderers, when good people do it they end up heroes, and when the rest of do it we end up looking like total idiots. But when’s that ever stopped us?