Iain Banks
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.Collection: Legal
Science fiction is trying to find alternative ways of looking at realities.Collection: Science
I'm an only child so am happy with my own company and I don't really get lonely.
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.
I still find it hard to understand that anyone could argue that you can't have machines that exhibit consciousness.
I think the future stopped looking American when you think back to Blade Runner and Neuromancer, when it started to look more Japanese.
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!
You have to have something worth saying and then the ability to say it- writing's a double skill, really.
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.
I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!
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.
By the usual reckoning, the worst books make the best films.
My point has always been that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, science fiction has been the most important genre there is.
Most mainstream male fiction is littered with heroines, and female characters are basically so great, you want to fall in love with them.
In so much of politics you're not allowed to disagree with what's been agreed.
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.
I think we need politicians; we need people who want to serve.
I still have some of my old University essays, and I do still have my drawing book from primary year seven.
Smell is a very animal thing, almost reptilian, where the more cerebral things like reading less so.
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 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.
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.
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.
A lot of what the 'Culture' is about is a reaction to all the science fiction I was reading in my very early teens.
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.
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 enjoy it too much - even if I knew I'd never get a book published, I would still write. I enjoy the experience of getting thoughts and ideas and plots and characters organised into this narrative framework.
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.
There is a quite a lot of effort involved but I find action sequences some of the quickest to write and the most fun.
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.
Science fiction has its own history, its own legacy of what's been done, what's been superseded, what's so much part of the furniture it's practically part of the fabric now, what's become no more than a joke... and so on. It's just plain foolish, as well as comically arrogant, to ignore all this, to fail to do the most basic research.
Empathize with stupidity and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot.Collection: Thinking
Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.Collection: Lying
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 othersCollection: Agony
One should never mistake pattern for meaning.Collection: Mistake
Political correctness is what right-wing bigots call what everybody else calls being politeCollection: Wings
Truth, I have learned, differs for everybody. Just as no two people ever see a rainbow in exactly the same place - and yet both most certainly see it, while the person seemingly standing right underneath it does not see it at all - so truth is a question of where one stands, and the direction one is looking in at the time.Collection: Truth
A guilty system recognizes no innocents.Collection: Guilt
My gratitude extends beyond the limits of my capacity to express it.Collection: Gratitude
There's an old Sysan saying that the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it.Collection: Tears
One should never regret one's excesses, only one's failures of nerve.Collection: Regret
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.Collection: Running
The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.Collection: Real
Reason shapes the future, but superstition infects the present.Collection: Shapes
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Simple
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.Collection: Giving
I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.Collection: Thinking