Top 33 Quotes by Iain Banks

Smell is a very animal thing, almost reptilian, where the more cerebral things like reading less so.

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.

By the usual reckoning, the worst books make the best films.

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.

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.

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.

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 think the future stopped looking American when you think back to Blade Runner and Neuromancer, when it started to look more Japanese.

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 still find it hard to understand that anyone could argue that you can't have machines that exhibit consciousness.