Zitat des Tages von Iain Banks:
I just come up with the stories and write them as well as I can. There's not really a great deal of strokey-beard thinking going on.
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.
By the usual reckoning, the worst books make the best films.
Science fiction is trying to find alternative ways of looking at realities.
You have to have something worth saying and then the ability to say it- writing's a double skill, really.
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.
Technology determines the possibilities of society. It doesn't matter whether you start out from a fascist state or a communist state or a free-market state.
I think the future stopped looking American when you think back to Blade Runner and Neuromancer, when it started to look more Japanese.
'Dead Air' is full of rants; it's a rant-based book. Yes, it's self-indulgence. I plead guilty; mea culpa.
As long as a film stays unmade, the book is entirely yours, it belongs to the writer. As soon as you make it into a film, suddenly more people see it than have ever read the book.
I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!
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'm not a great believer in awards-of course the fact that I've never won one has nothing to do with it at all!
I remember being shocked when I discovered some of my school pals didn't have books in their homes. I thought it was like not having oxygen, or hot water.
A lot of what the 'Culture' is about is a reaction to all the science fiction I was reading in my very early teens.
Science fiction has its own history, its own legacy of what's been done, what's been superseded, what's so much part of the furniture it's practically part of the fabric now, what's become no more than a joke... and so on. It's just plain foolish, as well as comically arrogant, to ignore all this, to fail to do the most basic research.
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.
Smell is a very animal thing, almost reptilian, where the more cerebral things like reading less so.
Most mainstream male fiction is littered with heroines, and female characters are basically so great, you want to fall in love with them.
I still have some of my old University essays, and I do still have my drawing book from primary year seven.
I'm an only child so am happy with my own company and I don't really get lonely.
