218 Quotes by Iain Banks

I’m saying with very few exceptions nothing lasts forever, and among those exceptions, no work or thought of man is numbered.

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...

As a writer, you get to play, you get alter time, you get to come up with the smart lines and the clever comebacks you wish you’d thought of.

There’s an old Sysan saying that the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it.

I thought that maybe what had happened had been for the best. The part of me which made the mistake with the buck, letting it get the better of me for a moment, might still be around if that acid test hadn’t found it out. The incompetent or misguided general had been dismissed.

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.

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.

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

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.