Iain Banks Writing Quotations

There is a quite a lot of effort involved but I find action sequences some of the quickest to write and the most fun.

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.

You have to have something worth saying and then the ability to say it- writing's a double skill, really.

I enjoy it too much - even if I knew I'd never get a book published, I would still write. I enjoy the experience of getting thoughts and ideas and plots and characters organised into this narrative framework.

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.

You get so caught up in what you're writing - action sequences tend to do that more than anything else because you're living it, and feeling for your characters.

The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.

Half the fun of writing a novel is finding out from other people later on what you actually meant.

Writing is like everything else: the more you do it the better you get. Don't try to perfect as you go along, just get to the end of the damn thing. Accept imperfections. Get it finished and then you can go back. If you try to polish every sentence there's a chance you'll never get past the first chapter.