Iain M. Banks Quotes

Yet my father died, I was forced to the throne, and although I knew I was not ready, I coped. I learned. I became a King by having to behave as one, not simply because I was my father’s son and had be...

You could find out most things, if you knew the right questions to ask. Even if you didn’t, you could still find out a lot.

Zakalwe, in all human societies we have ever reviewed, in every age and every state, there has seldom if ever been a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, co...

[He] just wants [...] forgiveness?Sma, given all the things Zakalwe’s done, just since we’ve known him, they’d have to invent a personal deity for him alone, to even start him.Sma turned away to look...

A Mind could hold any set of facts and opinions it wanted without having to tell anybody what it knew or thought, or why.

And was taken to the Forward Docks and a big, brightly lit hangar, where the Psychopath Class ex-Rapid Offensive Unit Frank Exchange of Views was waiting for her. Ulver laughed. 'It looks,' she snorte...

Bipedal, oxygen-breathing carboniform

It had been briefed that when Culture people didn’t speak Marain for a long time and did speak another language, they were liable to change; they acted differently, they started to think in that other...

It was good for games. What seemed complicated became simple; what appeared insoluble became soluble; what had been unknowable became obvious. A utility drug; an abstraction-modifier;

It was the night when people got paid and didn’t have to work the next day, and so by tradition went out to get drunk and into fights. Then

Obsession is just what those too timorous to follow an idea through to its logical conclusion call determination.

The Fate had moved, or had been moved, thirty light years in less than a picosecond.

You needed ear defenders, and the swirling slipstream caused total havoc to any hairstyle worth the name.

A guilty system recognizes no innocents.

All great promises are threats, I suppose, to the way things have been until that point, to some aspect of our lives, and we all suddenly become conservative, even though we want and need what the pro...

All these people seemed to do was talk! It supposed it was just what biologicals did. If you wanted to feel you were still somehow in control of a ship or a fleet or even your civilisation, talking am...

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

All you ever were was a piece of the universe thinking to itself

An electronic computer is also made up of matter, but organised differently; what is there so magical about the workings of the huge, slow cells of the animal brain that they can claim themselves to b...

But it was pointless, it was stupid; he thought about thoughtless things. If I were a seabird . . . but how could you be a seabird? If you were a seabird your brain would be tiny and stupid and you wo...