Iain M Banks - Collected Quotes

"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." (Iain Banks, "The Wasp Factory", 1984)

"All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of its rules." (Iain Banks, "The Player of Games", 1988)

"It is unusual for us to discover an imperial power-system in space. As a rule, such archaic forms of authority wither long before the relevant species drags itself off the home planet." (Iain M Banks, "The Player of Games", 1988)

"The very first-rank games acknowledge the element of chance, even if they rightly restrict raw luck." (Iain Banks, "The Player of Games", 1988)

"What, anyway, was he to say? That intelligence could surpass and excel the blind force of evolution, with its emphasis on mutation, struggle and death? That conscious cooperation was more efficient than feral competition?" (Iain Banks, "The Player of Games", 1988)

"What is all your studying worth, all your learning, all your knowledge, if it doesn't lead to wisdom? And what's wisdom but knowing what is right, and what is the right thing to do?" (Iain Banks, "Use of Weapons", 1990)

"I demand the freedom to do what seems right to me from first principles, and not the freedom always to behave selfishly, or always to do what a man would do in the circumstances, or always to do the opposite." (Iain M Banks, "The Business", 1999)

"The world isn’t fair, the universe isn’t fair. Physics, chemistry and mathematics, they aren’t fair. Or unfair, for that matter. Fairness is an idea, and  only conscious creatures have ideas. That’s us. We have ideas about right and wrong. We invent the idea of justice so that we can judge whether something is good or bad. We develop morality. We create rules to live by and call them laws, all to make life more fair." (Iain M Banks, "The Business", 1999)

"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." (Iain M Banks, "Look to Windward", 2000)

 "Any theory which causes solipsism to seem just as likely an explanation for the phenomena it seeks to describe ought to be held in the utmost suspicion." (Iain Banks, "The Algebraist", 2004)

"You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history." (Iain Banks, "The Steep Approach to Garbadale", 2007)

"All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself. Very specific; this bit, here, right now. All the rest was fantasy." (Iain Banks, "Surface Detail", 2010)

"One should never mistake pattern for meaning." (Iain Banks, "The Hydrogen Sonata",  2012)