Let's be clear: unless I have profoundly misunderstood its position, I pretty much despise American Libertarianism. Have these people seriously looked at the problems of the world and thought, 'Hmm, what we need here is a bit more selfishness'? . . . I beg to differ.

— Iain Banks

Look on the happy side, think of the good things. Hadn't it been clever? Yes, it had.

— Iain Banks

Maybe he's up to something, maybe he'ś not really crazy after all. Perhaps he just got fed up acting normal and decided to act crazy instead, and they locked him up because he went too far.

— Iain Banks

My point has always been that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, science fiction has been the most important genre there is.

— Iain Banks

Och, stop being so sensitive, Prentice; it isn't much fun getting old. One of the few pleasures that do come your way is to speak your mind... Certainly annoying your relatives is enjoyable too, but I expected better of you.

— Iain Banks

Oh, no, Cameron; I believe we're born free of sin and free of guilt. It's just that we all catch it, eventually. There are no clean rooms for morality, Cameron, no boys in bubbles kept in a guilt-free sterile zone. There are monasteries and nunneries, and people become recluses, but even that's just an elegant way of giving up. Washing one's hand didn't work two thousand years ago, and it doesn't work today. Involvement, Cameron, connection.

— Iain Banks

One of your American professors said that to study religion was merely to know the mind of man, but if one truly wanted to know the mind of God, you must study physics.

— Iain Banks

Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another.

— Iain Banks

The flames had passed over those flattened blades and consumed their heather neighbors on either side while they themselves had remained, made proof against the blaze and guaranteed their stark survival just by their earlier oppression.

— Iain Banks

The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others

— Iain Banks