Top 120 Iain Banks Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “I think we need politicians; we need people who want to serve.”

— Iain Banks

102. “I wouldn’t like to be a character in one of my books!”

— Iain Banks

103. “Thinking what had happened over in my mind, trying to figure out the whys and wherefores, see what lessons were to be learned, what signs to be read in it all.”

— Iain Banks

104. “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...”

— Iain Banks

105. “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.”

— Iain Banks

106. “Look at these humans! How could such glacial slowness even be called life? An age could pass, virtual empires rise and fall in the time they took to open their mouths to utter some new inanity!”

— Iain Banks

107. “Though drones, avatars and even humans are one thing; the loss of any is not without moral and diplomatic import, of course, but might be dismissed as merely unfortunate and regrettable, something to be smoothed over through the usual channels. Attacking a ship, on the other hand, is an unambiguous act of war.”

— Iain Banks

108. “I’m doing fine. I eat dogs! Heh heh heh!’ I.”

— Iain Banks

109. “Aye,’ McCann said ruefully, ’if yer rich yer just eccentric; if yer poor yer a nutcase an they stick ye in the bin.”

— Iain Banks

110. “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.”

— Iain Banks

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

— Iain Banks

112. “He was one of those men... who know in their hearts that for all their edgy, belligerent hardness they are just unhappy kids, emotional retards.”

— Iain Banks

113. “It occurred to me then, as it has before, that that is what men are really for. Both sexes can do one thing specially well; women can give birth and men can kill.”

— Iain Banks

114. “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.”

— Iain Banks

115. “There was a layer of grey-blue smoke in the room at about shoulder level, and a big wave in it, probably produced by me as I came in through the double doors of the back porch. The wave rose slowly between us while my father stared at me.”

— Iain Banks

116. “Once you get over the simple unpleasantness of it – I suspect most people would gag, the first time – it is easier to wipe somebody else’s bum than it is your own, because you can see what you’re doing and use both hands at once if necessary. The whole process is much more efficient and uses no more toilet paper than is strictly required, so it’s better for the environment, too. If we were really green we’d all have somebody else wipe our bums, though I can’t see it catching on.”

— Iain Banks

117. “Any such inklings were like a few scattered grains of truth dissolved in an ocean of nonsense, and were anyway generally inextricably bound up with patently paranoid ravings which served only to devalue the small amounts of sense and pertinence with which they were associated.”

— Iain Banks

118. “This is so much like the old days. And, again, I have mixed feelings. In some ways it’s good and comfortable to be fitting straight back in like I’ve never been away, but, on the other hand, I’m getting this constrictive feeling as well. It’s the same places – like the bars and pubs on Friday night – the same people, the same conversations, the same arguments and the same attitudes. Five years away and not much seems to have changed. I can’t decide if this is good or bad.”

— Iain Banks

119. “He could describe walking towards the Taj Mahal – ho-hum, thinks the reader, immediately in the realm of the tacky postcard – and still give you a wholly fresh impression of the exact scale and actual presence of that white tomb; delicate but powerful, compact and yet boundlessly imposing. Epic grace. With those two words he encapsulated it, and you knew exactly what he meant.”

— Iain Banks

120. “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.”

— Iain Banks

121. “He walked through the white corridors, past the notice-boards with their offers of small rooms and old cars, past the coffee bar where people sat at tables, past a hole in the white floor where an old chair stood sentry over an opened conduit in which a torch shone and a man crawled, and as he left he looked at his watch:.”

— Iain Banks

122. “Well, we’re all young once, Prentice, and those that are lucky get to be old.”

— Iain Banks

123. “My greatest enemies are Women and the Sea.”

— Iain Banks

124. “Sometimes, when I have to make precious substances such as toenail cheese or belly-button fluff, I have to go without a shower or bath for days and days; I hate doing this because I soon feel dirty and itchy, and the only bright thing about such abstinence is how good it feels to have a shower at the end of it.”

— Iain Banks

125. “Death was change; it led to new chances, new vacancies, new niches and opportunities; it was not all loss.”

— Iain Banks

126. “They were here, and then they weren’t, and that was all there was.”

— Iain Banks

127. “I suppose it has gone out of fashion and they are out spraying slogans on walls, sniffing glue or trying to get laid.”

— Iain Banks

128. “That’s the thing about a good porter”–and he shrugged, or shook his head and sounded so rueful and sort of growly as he said, “Deals with all your baggage.”

— Iain Banks

129. “Whatever; if there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s machines that talk back: SILENCE!”

— Iain Banks

130. “If this goes badly and I make a crater, I want it named after me!”

— Iain Banks