Top 120 Iain Banks Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I think the future stopped looking American when you think back to Blade Runner and Neuromancer, when it started to look more Japanese.”

— Iain Banks

52. “Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.”

— Iain Banks

53. “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.”

— Iain Banks

54. “Escape is a consumer goods like another.”

— Iain Banks

55. “Bright morning comes; the bloody-fingered dawn with zealous light sets seas of air ablaze and bends to earth another false beginning. My eyes open like cornflowers, stick, crusted with their own stale dew, then take that light.”

— Iain Banks

56. “One of the advantages of having laws is the pleasure one may take in breaking them.”

— Iain Banks

57. “There has seldom if ever a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this simple fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots.”

— Iain Banks

58. “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?”

— Iain Banks

59. “The madder people. A lot of them seem to be leaders of countries or religions or armies. The real loonies.”

— Iain Banks

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

— Iain Banks

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

— Iain Banks

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

— Iain Banks

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

— Iain Banks

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

— Iain Banks

65. “Mr Blawke always reminded me of a heron; I’m not sure why. Something to do with a sense of rapacious stillness, perhaps, and also the aura of one who knows time is on his side.”

— Iain Banks

66. “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.”

— Iain Banks

67. “There is only darkness, starless and complete. The waves glitter like a million dull knives.”

— Iain Banks

68. “After doing extensive research, I can definitely tell you that single malt whiskies are good to drink.”

— Iain Banks

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

— Iain Banks

70. “He would never forget the feeling of that first year, the sense of freedom just being on his own gave him. He had his own room for the first time, his own money to spend as he wanted, his own food to buy and places to go and decisions to make; it was glorious, sublime.”

— Iain Banks

71. “As long as a film stays unmade, the book is entirely yours, it belongs to the writer. As soon as you make it into a film, suddenly more people see it than have ever read the book.”

— Iain Banks

72. “I remember being shocked when I discovered some of my school pals didn’t have books in their homes. I thought it was like not having oxygen, or hot water.”

— Iain Banks

73. “Experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place.”

— Iain Banks

74. “That would require faith. I do not beliebe in faith. I believe it exists but I do not believe it works. I don’t know what the rules are here; I can’t risk throwing everything away on a long shot.”

— Iain Banks

75. “Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed, and I think they know in their hearts that other people are just the same, and one of the reasons people become angry when they argue is that they realize just that, as they trot out their excuses.”

— Iain Banks

76. “I luv the ded, this old baster sez to me when I wiz tryin to get some innfurmashin out ov him. You fukin old pervirt I sez, gettin a bit fed up by this time enyway, an slit his throate; ah asks you whare the fukin Sleeping Byootie woz, no whit kind of humpin you lyke.”

— Iain Banks

77. “Willy, one of the guys at the distillery, comes up with what Oliver and I agree is the best definition of what a ‘dram’ actually is: ‘A measure of whisky that is pleasing to both guest and host.”

— Iain Banks

78. “Escape is a commodity like anything else.”

— Iain Banks

79. “Hair on a man’s head is like the opposite of salt in a dish; you can take it away but you can’t add it in.”

— Iain Banks

80. “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.”

— Iain Banks

81. “Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another.”

— Iain Banks

82. “The combination of modern ordnance and outdated tactics had, as usual, created enormous casualties on both sides.”

— Iain Banks

83. “Probably the most blood came when I used a cheese grater on his knees.”

— Iain Banks

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

— Iain Banks

85. “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.”

— Iain Banks

86. “One of your American professors said that to study religion was merely to know the mind of man, but if one truly wanted to know the mind of God, you must study physics.”

— Iain Banks

87. “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.”

— Iain Banks

88. “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.”

— Iain Banks

89. “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.”

— Iain Banks

90. “I brought my face up and put my head back, baring my neck to the wind like a lover, to the rain like an offering.”

— Iain Banks

91. “I’m a devoted husband. That must strike you as totally deviant.”

— Iain Banks

92. “He knew all the answers. Everybody did. Everybody knew everything and everybody knew all the answers. It was just that the enemy seemed to know better ones.”

— Iain Banks

93. “By the usual reckoning, the worst books make the best films.”

— Iain Banks

94. “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?”

— Iain Banks

95. “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.”

— Iain Banks

96. “It is good to remove oneself sometimes and get a sense of perspective from a little further away.”

— Iain Banks

97. “All I said was that I thought it was a judgement from God that Blyth had first lost his leg and then had the replacement become the instrument of his downfall. All because of the rabbits. Eric, who was going through a religious phase at the time which I suppose I was to some extent copying, thought this was a terrible thing to say; God wasn’t like that. I said the one I believed in was.”

— Iain Banks

98. “People can be teachers and idiots; they can be philosophers and idiots; they can be politicians and idiots... in fact I think they have to be... a genius can be an idiot. The world is largely run for and by idiots; it is no great handicap in life and in certain areas is actually a distinct advantage and even a prerequisite for advancement.”

— Iain Banks

99. “If you have any helpful suggestions I’d be pleased to hear them. If all you can do is make snide insinuations then it would probably benefit all concerned if you bestowed the fruits of your prodigious wit on someone with the spare time to give them the consideration they doubtless deserve.”

— Iain Banks

100. “Something in your voice tells me we approach the question of remuneration.”

— Iain Banks