{"author":"Iain Banks","author_id":"Iain+Banks","total_quotes":39,"quotes":[{"text":"Bright morning comes; the bloody-fingered dawn with zealous light sets seas of air ablaze and bends to earth another false beginning. My eyes open like cornflowers, stick, crusted with their own stale dew, then take that light.","author":"Iain Banks","tags":["dawn","sleep","waking-up"],"id":1142,"author_id":"Iain+Banks"},{"text":"My point has always been that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, science fiction has been the most important genre there is.","author":"Iain Banks","tags":["revolution "],"id":3291,"author_id":"Iain+Banks"},{"text":"I switched the light out again. The room was totally dark, not even the starlight showing while my eyes adjusted. Perhaps I would ask for one of those LED alarm radios, though I’m very fond of my old brass alarm clock. Once I tied a wasp tot the striking-surface of each of the copper-coloured bells on top, where the little hammer would hit them in the morning when the alarm went off. I always wake up before the alarm goes, so I got to watch.","author":"Iain Banks","tags":["killer","murder","young"],"id":12596,"author_id":"Iain+Banks"},{"text":"Escape is a commodity like anything else.","author":"Iain Banks","tags":["consumerism","escape"],"id":26620,"author_id":"Iain+Banks"},{"text":"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.","author":"Iain Banks","tags":["morality"],"id":37313,"author_id":"Iain+Banks"},{"text":"...And I confess that, like a child, I cry. Ah, self-pity; I think we are at our most honest and sincere when we feel sorry for ourselves.","author":"Iain Banks","tags":["self-pity","sorrow"],"id":47574,"author_id":"Iain+Banks"},{"text":"There are no gods, we are told, so I must make my own salvation.","author":"Iain Banks","tags":["gods","inspirational","salvation"],"id":75429,"author_id":"Iain+Banks"},{"text":"I sucked that smoke in and made it part of me, joined mystically with the universe right at that point, said Yes to drugs forever just by the unique hit I got from that one packet of fags Andy liberated from his dad. It was a revelation, an epiphany; a sudden realisation that it was possible for matter - something there in front of you, in your hand, in your lungs, in your pocket - to take your brain apart and reassemble it in ways you hadn't thought of previously. This was better than religion, or this was what people meant by religion! The whole point was that this worked! People said Believe In God or Do Well At School or Buy This or Vote For Me or whatever, but nothing ever worked the way substances worked, nothing ever fucking delivered the way they did. They were truth. Everything else was falsehood.","author":"Iain Banks","tags":["drugs"],"id":105221,"author_id":"Iain+Banks"},{"text":"I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.","author":"Iain Banks","tags":["kindlehighlight"],"id":110948,"author_id":"Iain+Banks"},{"text":"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.","author":"Iain Banks","tags":["truth-of-life"],"id":119612,"author_id":"Iain+Banks"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":39,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}