Anyway, you can't leave her like that. You can't do that to the woman. She doesn't deserve it; nobody does. You don't belong to her and she doesn't belong to you, but you're both part of each other; if she got up and left now and walked away and you never saw each other again for the rest of your lives, and you lived an ordinary waking life for another fifty years, even so on your deathbed you would still know she was part of you.
Iain BanksI still find it hard to understand that anyone could argue that you can't have machines that exhibit consciousness.
Iain BanksThere is a quite a lot of effort involved but I find action sequences some of the quickest to write and the most fun.
Iain BanksI deliberately keep myself apart from a lot of stuff; I don't Tweet, I don't do Facebook, I don't blog, and that's largely because I spend my working life staring at a screen and hitting a keyboard, I am trying to cut down on that, not increase it.
Iain BanksMy point has always been that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, science fiction has been the most important genre there is.
Iain BanksPeople were always sorry. Sorry they had done what they had done, sorry they were doing what they were doing, sorry they were going to do what they were going to do; but they still did whatever it is. The sorrow never stopped them; it just made them feel better. And so the sorrow never stopped.
Iain Banks