Top 120 Iain Banks Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot.”

— Iain Banks

2. “Our destination is the same in the end, but our journey – part chosen, part determined – is different for us all, and changes even as we live and grow.”

— Iain Banks

3. “It’s a library, only the stupid or the evil are afraid of those.”

— Iain Banks

4. “I think the easiest people to fool are ourselves. Fooling ourselves may even be a necessary precondition for fooling others.”

— Iain Banks

5. “All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now. All the rest was fantasy.”

— Iain Banks

6. “Political correctness is what right-wing bigots call what everybody else calls being polite.”

— Iain Banks

7. “One should never mistake pattern for meaning.”

— Iain Banks

8. “I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.”

— Iain Banks

9. “You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history.”

— Iain Banks

Featured in: Reading Quotes

10. “An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.”

— Iain Banks

11. “Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.”

— Iain Banks

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

— Iain Banks

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

— Iain Banks

14. “I am not being obtuse. You are being paranoid.”

— Iain Banks

15. “Look on the happy side, think of the good things. Hadn’t it been clever? Yes, it had.”

— Iain Banks

16. “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.”

— Iain Banks

17. “I’m an only child so am happy with my own company and I don’t really get lonely.”

— Iain Banks

18. “The bomb lives only as it is falling.”

— Iain Banks

19. “It was the day my grandmother exploded.”

— Iain Banks

20. “There are no gods, we are told, so I must make my own salvation.”

— Iain Banks

21. “A guilty system recognizes no innocents.”

— Iain Banks

22. “Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in the utmost suspicion.”

— Iain Banks

23. “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.”

— Iain Banks

Featured in: Strong Quotes

24. “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.”

— Iain Banks

25. “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.”

— Iain Banks

26. “What is all your studying worth, all your learning, all your knowledge, if it doesn’t lead to wisdom? And what’s wisdom but knowing what is right, and what is the right thing to do?”

— Iain Banks

27. “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!”

— Iain Banks

28. “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.”

— Iain Banks

29. “The music machine played away – far away – and when I started to understand the lyrics of a Cocteau Twins song, I knew I was wrecked.”

— Iain Banks

30. “One should never regret one’s excesses, only one’s failures of nerve.”

— Iain Banks

31. “Yes of course I know it’s all a dream. Isn’t everything?”

— Iain Banks

32. “This is not a long bridge, but it goes on for ever. I am not far from the bank, but I will never get there. I walk but I never move. Fast or slow, running, turning, doubling back, jumping, throwing myself or stopping; nothing makes any difference.”

— Iain Banks

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

— Iain Banks

Featured in: Fun Quotes

34. “What’s one more meaningless act of violence on that zoo of a planet? It would be appropriate. When in Rome; burn it.”

— Iain Banks

35. “And even a small amount of talent can go an appallingly long way, these days.”

— Iain Banks

36. “People were always sorry. Sorry they had done what they had done, sorry they were doing what they were doing, sorry they were going to do what they were going to do; but they still did whatever it is. The sorrow never stopped them; it just made them feel better. And so the sorrow never stopped.”

— Iain Banks

37. “Well, it is always easier to succeed at death.”

— Iain Banks

38. “Half the fun of writing a novel is finding out from other people later on what you actually meant.”

— Iain Banks

Featured in: Fun Quotes

39. “Here, in the bare dark face of night A calm unhurried eye draws sight We see in what we think we fear The cloudings of our thought made clear.”

— Iain Banks

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

— Iain Banks

41. “The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others.”

— Iain Banks

42. “A lot of what the ‘Culture’ is about is a reaction to all the science fiction I was reading in my very early teens.”

— Iain Banks

Featured in: Reading Quotes

43. “I am, as I have always been, of the opinion that while the niceties of normal moral constraints should be our guides, they must not be our masters.”

— Iain Banks

44. “Soon equates to good, later to worse, Uagen Zlepe, scholar. Therefore, immediacy.”

— Iain Banks

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

— Iain Banks

46. “Even galaxy-spanning anarchist utopias of stupefying full-spectrum civilisational power have turf wars within their unacknowledged militaries.”

— Iain Banks

47. “My enemy is twice dead, and I still have him.”

— Iain Banks

48. “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.”

— Iain Banks

49. “Perdition awaits at the end of a road constructed entirely from good intentions, the devil emerges from the details and hell abides in the small print.”

— Iain Banks

50. “What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead?”

— Iain Banks