Iain Banks
Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.Collection: Exercise
"You like music, Mr. Gurgeh?" Hamin asked, leaning over to the man. Gurgeh nodded. "Well, a little does no harm."Collection: Men
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.Collection: Possibility Of Change
I'm from out of town," he said breezily. This was true. He'd never been within a hundred light-years of the place.Collection: Light
Escape is a consumer goods like anotherCollection: Goods
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.Collection: Looks
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 clearCollection: Eye
I held my crotch, closed my eyes and repeated my secret catechism.Collection: Eye
-"Then what," Lededje asked, trying to keep her voice cold and not get caught up in the avatar´s obvious enthusiasm, "is making you smile about a disaster?" -"Well, first, I didn´t cause it! Nothing to do with me, hands clean. Always a bonus.Collection: Hands
What's one more meaningless act of violence on that zoo of a planet? It would be appropriate. When in Rome; burn it.Collection: Zoos
I'm a devoted husband. That must strike you as totally deviant.Collection: Husband
The combination of modern ordnance and outdated tactics had, as usual, created enormous casualties on both sides.Collection: Usual
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.Collection: Lonely
Dead Air' is full of rants; it's a rant-based book. Yes, it's self-indulgence. I plead guilty; mea culpa.Collection: Book
...[Changers] were a threat to identity, a challenge to the individualism even of those they were never likely to impersonate. It had nothing to do with souls or physical or spiritual possession; it was, as the Idirans well understood, the behavouristic copying of another which revolted. Individuality, the thing which most humans held more precious than anything else about themselves, was somehow cheapened by the ease with which a Changer could ignore it as a limitation and use it as a disguise.Collection: Spiritual
You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history.Collection: Reading
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.Collection: Strong
A lot of what the ‘Culture’ is about is a reaction to all the science fiction I was reading in my very early teens.Collection: Reading
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.Collection: Fun