Top 25 Iain Banks Quotes

In so much of politics you’re not allowed to disagree with what’s been agreed.

Science fiction is trying to find alternative ways of looking at realities.

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.

I still have some of my old University essays, and I do still have my drawing book from primary year seven.

I wouldn’t like to be a character in one of my books!

I think we need politicians; we need people who want to serve.

I don’t really do themes. I might accidentally, but themes are an emergent phenomena of the writing of the book, of just trying to get a story out there.

I just come up with the stories and write them as well as I can. There’s not really a great deal of strokey-beard thinking going on.

I deliberately keep myself apart from a lot of stuff; I don’t Tweet, I don’t do Facebook, I don’t blog, and that’s largely because I spend my working life staring at a screen and hitting a keyboard, I am trying to cut down on that, not increase it.

I think a lot of people are frightened of technology and frightened of change, and the way to deal with something you’re frightened of is to make fun of it. That’s why science fiction fans are dismissed as geeks and nerds.

‘Dead Air’ is full of rants; it’s a rant-based book. Yes, it’s self-indulgence. I plead guilty; mea culpa.

I’m not a great believer in awards-of course the fact that I’ve never won one has nothing to do with it at all!

I love writing and can’t imagine not being able to do it. I want an easy life and if it had been difficult I wouldn’t be doing it. I do admire writers who do it even though it costs them.

Most mainstream male fiction is littered with heroines, and female characters are basically so great, you want to fall in love with them.

By the usual reckoning, the worst books make the best films.

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.

I’ve always loved Scotland, and I’m not a huge fan of big cities, to be honest. I like them to dip into for a bit, but I’m not sure I would want to live in one again.

Technology determines the possibilities of society. It doesn’t matter whether you start out from a fascist state or a communist state or a free-market state.

Even in my side of the world, I’ve been in publishing for what, 25 or 26 years, and it’s gone from being a gentlemen’s club to being a few big players, and it’s very corporatised.

You have to have something worth saying and then the ability to say it- writing’s a double skill, really.

I still find it hard to understand that anyone could argue that you can’t have machines that exhibit consciousness.

In theory, I work an eight-hour day and a five-day week which means I can socialise with my pals who mostly have normal jobs like teaching and computer programming.

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 is a quite a lot of effort involved but I find action sequences some of the quickest to write and the most fun.

Smell is a very animal thing, almost reptilian, where the more cerebral things like reading less so.