# Iain M. Banks

- Quotes: 299
- Author page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/iain-m-banks

## Books

- [Against A Dark Background](https://www.leafyquotes.com/iain-m-banks/against-a-dark-background.md) — 20 quotes
- [Consider Phlebas](https://www.leafyquotes.com/iain-m-banks/consider-phlebas.md) — 8 quotes
- [Excession](https://www.leafyquotes.com/iain-m-banks/excession.md) — 21 quotes
- [Feersum Endjinn](https://www.leafyquotes.com/iain-m-banks/feersum-endjinn.md) — 11 quotes
- [Inversions](https://www.leafyquotes.com/iain-m-banks/inversions.md) — 22 quotes
- [Look To Windward](https://www.leafyquotes.com/iain-m-banks/look-to-windward.md) — 23 quotes
- [Matter](https://www.leafyquotes.com/iain-m-banks/matter.md) — 27 quotes
- [Surface Detail](https://www.leafyquotes.com/iain-m-banks/surface-detail.md) — 35 quotes
- [The Algebraist](https://www.leafyquotes.com/iain-m-banks/the-algebraist.md) — 18 quotes
- [The Hydrogen Sonata](https://www.leafyquotes.com/iain-m-banks/the-hydrogen-sonata.md) — 35 quotes
- [The Player Of Games](https://www.leafyquotes.com/iain-m-banks/the-player-of-games.md) — 11 quotes
- [The State Of The Art](https://www.leafyquotes.com/iain-m-banks/the-state-of-the-art.md) — 18 quotes
- [The Wasp Factory](https://www.leafyquotes.com/iain-m-banks/the-wasp-factory.md) — 1 quote
- [Transition](https://www.leafyquotes.com/iain-m-banks/transition.md) — 29 quotes
- [Use Of Weapons](https://www.leafyquotes.com/iain-m-banks/use-of-weapons.md) — 20 quotes

## Recently added quotes

> It’s even more important to prosecute police who’ve broken the law than it is to prosecute anybody else, because otherwise nobody trusts the police.

p. 266

> Which was more likely: what appeared to be the case, or this all being a lie, a set-up, a vast and incomprehensible joke? Discuss.

p. 298

> I only tell them that because that’s what they like to hear, what they want to hear. That’s one of the lessons I’ve learned, isn’t it? You can go a long way just telling people what they want to hear. Of course, you got to be careful, and you got to choose the right people, but still, know that I mean?

p. 16

> One of the wisest things anybody ever said to me was that if all you ever care about is money, money is all that will ever care for you.

p. 65

> We had to assume that solipsism was nonsense because otherwise everything else around us was nonsense and irrelevant, and the result of a kind of self-inflicted deceit.

p. 242

> He was one of those people who got to the top of an organisation through luck, connections, the indulgence of superiors and that sort of carelessness towards others that the easily impressed termed ruthlessness and those of a less gullible nature called sociopathy. But sometimes, just through his sheer unthinking brusqueness and inability to think through the consequences of a remark, he said what everybody else was only thinking. A comic poet working in obscene doggerel.

p. 316

> I first encountered her near the beginning of that golden age which nobody noticed was happening at the time; I mean the long decade between the fall of the Wall and the fall of the Towers.
>
> If you wish to be pedantically exact about it, those retrospectively blessed dozen years lasted from the chilly, fevered Central European night of November 9, 1989 to that bright morning on the Eastern Seaboard of America of September 11, 2001. One event symbolised the lifted threat of a worldwide nuclear holocaust, something which had been hanging over humanity for nearly forty years, and so ended an age of idiocy. The other ushered in a new one.

p. 2

> The old and powerful never want to let go. They always think they’re both profoundly indispensable and uniquely right. They are always wrong. Part of the function of ageing and dying is to let the next generation have its say, its time in the sun, to sweep away the mistakes of the previous age while, if they’re lucky, retaining the advances made and the benefits accrued.

p. 331

> There is a saying that some foolish people believe: what does not kill you makes you stronger. I know for a fact, having seen the evidence – indeed, often enough having been the cause of it – that what does not kill you can leave you maimed. Or crippled, or begging for death or in one of those ghastly twilights experienced – and one has to hope that that is entirely not the right word – by those in a locked-in or persistent vegetative state. In my experience the same people also believe that everything happens for a reason. Given the unalleviatedly barbarous history of every world we have ever encountered with anything resembling Man in it, this is a statement of quite breathtakingly casual retrospective and ongoing cruelty, tantamount to the condonation of the most severe and unforgivable sadism.

p. 274

> Any argument or point of view that makes solipsism look no less likely may be discounted.

p. 241

> People will generally make whatever compromises with the world they think necessary still to convince themselves that they are the most important thing in it.

p. 328

> Madame d’Ortolan was, she liked to think, of elegant middle age, though to the casual observer this might imply that she expected to live to be about one hundred and twenty.

p. 24