Iain M Banks Book Quotes & Sayings

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

To the people who insist they really do have a great idea but they just can't write, I'd say that given some of the books I've read, or at least started to read, it would appear that not being able to write is absolutely no obstacle whatsoever to writing a book and securing a publishing contract. Though becoming famous in some other field first may help. — Iain Banks

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. — Iain Banks

I still have some of my old University essays, and I do still have my drawing book from primary year seven. — Iain Banks

'Dead Air' is full of rants; it's a rant-based book. Yes, it's self-indulgence. I plead guilty; mea culpa. — Iain Banks

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. — Iain Banks

Well," the voice said, seemingly oblivious, "one thing that does happen when you live a long time is that you start to realise the essential futility of so much that we do, especially when you see the same patterns of behaviour repeated by succeeding generations and across different species. You see the same dreams, the same hopes, the same ambitions and aspirations, reiterated, and the same actions, the same courses and tactics and strategies, regurgitated, to the same predictable and often lamentable effects, and you start to think, So? Does it really matter? Why really are you bothering with all this? Are these not just further doomed, asinine ways of attempting to fill your vacuous, pointless existence, wedged slivered as it is between the boundless infinitudes of dark oblivion book-ending its utter triviality?" "Uh-huh, — Iain M. Banks

In another large journal book, he wrote his notes out again, along with further notes on the notes, and then started to cross words out of the completed, annotated notes, carefully removing word after word until he had something that looked like a poem. This was how he imagined poetry to be made. — Iain M. Banks

Hersesy is denying the word of God, and the word of God is much more reliably expressed in the natural world as it's revealed through reason and science than in what I have heard described wonderfully as the giant book of Jewish fairy stories — Iain Banks