Iain Banks Quotes

I think I've written 40 books, and none of them have been heavy on action. I'm an introspective person.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.

I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.

If you are a good writer - and I think I am - you are able to handle any kind of group and imagine their lives.

Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.

There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.

When I am writing, I'm very much on the ground, on the same ground my characters are treading.

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.

For me, inspiration isn't a sort of spark which lights the fire of the story. It's more like a thread, one of many, which you can tease out of a story once it's written, if you feel so inclined.

Stories come to me and I don't know where they come from, but afterwards I can look back and say, 'Oh yes, that's got a little bit of me, or a little bit of my own son in it'. That's where ideas come from.

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

I wonder if it's in the nature of fiction writers to never quite see their own lives as 'real,' since we are always making stuff up!

Stephen King has inspired me with his humor and honesty, and his admonition that the author's job is to tell the truth.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

Anthony Powell taught me to write; he has such brilliant control of the mechanics of the novel.

I always find stuff in my characters to relate to.

My novels are all ideas.

There isn't any distinction between a reader and a writer - reading is so much a part of it.

You have to have empathy, knowledge and compassion for your characters if you're a writer.

When I am writing a story it feels as real as the life I am experiencing off the page. It's an emotional illusion, I guess.

If you set out to write an adjective novel, you're setting out to write a mediocre novel; your allegiance is to the adjective, not to the story, and then that just sucks all the joy right out of it.

Even though I don't write about things that come from my life because I'm lucky, and I live in a great place with great kids and, you know, a great husband, I think you can find threads of me in the characters, so that's really what being a writer is, probably.

All my characters have got a big slice of me in them. A big piece of me, because it's my dialogue and this is the way I think and talk.

Something about your life always makes its way into your stories. That's just the nature of the beast.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.