William Gibson Quotes

I grew up in southwestern Virginia. I was born in South Carolina, but only because my parents had a vacation cabin or something there on the beach. I was like a summer baby. But I did grow up in the South. I grew up in serious, serious Appalachia, in a very small town.

[Slitscan's audience] is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.

I don't think nostalgia is a healthy modality. But nostalgia and a sense of history are not the same thing. Nostalgia is a dysfunction of the historical impulse, or a corruption of the historical impulse.

The charges have to do with conspiracy to augment an artificial intelligence.

I had a list of things that science fiction, particularly American science fiction, to me seemed to do with tedious regularity. One was to not have strong female protagonists. One was to envision the future, whatever it was, as America.

Wonderful", the Flatline said, "I never did like to do anything simple when I could do it ass-backwards.

And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.

Hak Nam rose before her as she waded nearer, but with a dream's logic it grew no closer. Backwashing sea, sucking at her ankles. The Walled City is growing. Being grown. From the fabric of the beach, wrack and wreckage of the world before things changed. Unthinkable tonnage, dumped here by barge and bulk-lifter in the course of the great reconstruction. The minuscule bugs of Rodel-van Erp seethe there, lifting the iron-caged balconies that are sleeping rooms, countless unplanned windows throwing blank silver rectangles back against the fog. A thing of random human accretion, monstrous and superb, it is being reconstituted here, retranslated from its later incarnation as a realm of consensual fantasy. The

I don't generate a storyline and then fill it out in the course of writing. The story actually generates in the course of the writing. It's one of the reasons I've never been comfortable doing screenplays, because in order to get the contract for the screenplay, you have to sit down and tell them what's going to happen.

Farber says (in my recollection, anyway) the European (or classical) art, including film, is culturally assumed to be a monumental slab. It's about that slab, and how it's been shaped, or what's been carved on it. In "termite art" though, your slab has been wormholed countless times, and its meaning is really taking place in the resulting interstices. The actual art of the piece, in other words, and your enjoyment of it, is taking place in the cracks, and the shape of the slab is coincidental and ultimately meaningless.

Know what's worse than imaginary, Leon?"
"What?"
"Half-imaginary.

Molly and Armitage ate in silence, while Case sawed shakily at his steak, reducing it to uneaten bite-sized fragments, which he pushed around in the rich sauce, finally abandoning the whole thing. 'Jesus,' Molly said, her own plate empty, 'gimme that. You know what this costs?' She took his plate. 'They gotta raise a whole animal for years and then they kill it. This isn't vat stuff.' She forked a mouthful up and chewed. 'Not

Don't let the little fuckers generation gap you.

If you believe the journalists, he's the single wealthiest individual, period. As rich as some zaibatsu. But there's the catch, really: is he an individual? In the sense that you are, or I am? No.

Because people who couldn't imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn't need to imagine, because they already were.

It was called dub, a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast libraries of digitalized pop; it was worship, Molly said, and a sense of community.

We see in order to move; we move in order to see.

You feel like you have emotions, to me."
"Where's the line between modeling them and having them, though? But I know I can't just make them go away.

ORDINARY SAD-ASS HUMANNESS

Interface evolves toward transparency. The one you have to devote the least conscious effort to, survives, prospers.

I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity.

The past is past, the future unformed. There is only the moment, and that is where he prefers to be.

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

For some reason, now, she saw the panel in the Roberts, all those faces. Read Us the Book of the Names of the Dead. All the Marlys, she thought all the girls she'd been through the long season of youth.

Not that I know of. He had this idea that it was gone, sort of; not gone gone, but gone into everything, the whole matrix. Like it wasn't in cyberspace anymore, it just was.

Sometimes, at dawn, perched on the edge of his unmade bed, drifting into sleep - he never slept lying down, now - he thought about her. Antoinette. And them. The belonging kind. Sometimes he speculated dreamily. . . Perhaps they were like house mice, the sort of small animal evolved to live only in the walls of man-made structures.

He's quite horrible, Virek, I think . . ." Marly hesitated. "Quite likely," Andrea said, taking another sip of coffee. "Do you expect anyone that wealthy to be a nice, normal sort?" "I felt, at one point, that he wasn't quite human. Felt that very strongly.

The Ono-Sendai; next year's most expensive Hosaka computer; a Sony monitor; a dozen disks of corporate-grade ice; a Braun coffeemaker.

the mall crowds swaying like wind-blown grass, a field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies of need and gratification

It is a way now, approximately, of being at home. The forum has become one of the most consistent places of her life, like a familiar cafe that exists someone outside geography and beyond time zones.
There are perhaps twenty regular posters on F:F:F:, and some muchlarger and uncounted number of lurkers. And right now there are three people in Chat. But there's no way of knowing exactly who until you are in there, and the chat room she finds not so comforting. It's strange even with friends, like sitting in a pitch-dark cellar conversing with people at a distance of about fifteen feet. the hectic speed, and the brevity of the lines in the thread, plus the feeling that everyone is talking at once, at counmter-purposes, deter her.

When I was a child, science fiction was the first source I've found for information. Science fiction was a very very low cultural stream in those days. It was completly below the radar and no one bothered to censurate it.

Cyberspace is where you are when you're on the telephone.

The future is there ... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.

And then she hears the sound of a helicopter, from somewhere behind her and, turning, sees the long white beam of light sweeping the dead ground as it comes, like a lighthouse gone mad from loneliness, and searching that barren ground as foolishly, as randomly, as any grieving heart ever has.

Now Gentry went to the big display unit, the projection table. "There are worlds within worlds," he said. "Macrocosm, microcosm.

Ancient television and withdrew a silver-black vacuum tube. "See this? Part of my DNA, sort of. . . ." He tossed the thing into the shadows and Case heard it pop and tinkle. "You're always building models. Stone circles. Cathedrals. Pipe-organs. Adding machines.

Nighttown, because the Pit's inverted, and the bottom of its bowl touches the sky, the sky that Nighttown never sees, sweating under its own firmament of acrylic resin, up where the Lo Teks crouch in the dark like gargoyles,

Vodou says, there's God, sure, Gran Met, but He's big, too big and too far away to worry Himself if your ass is poor, or you can't get laid. Come on, man, you know how this works, it's street religion, came out of a dirt-poor place a million years ago. Vodou's like the street. Some duster chops out your sister, you don't go camp on the Yakuza's doorstep, do you? No way. You go to somebody, though, who can get the thing done.

High overhead, in the reflected glare of arc lamps, one of the unfinished Fuller domes shut out two thirds of the salmon-pink evening sky, its ragged edge like broken gray honeycomb. The Sprawl's patchwork of domes tended to generate inadvertent microclimates; there were areas of a few city blocks where a fine drizzle of condensation fell continually from the soot-stained geodesics, and sections of high dome famous for displays of static-discharge, a peculiarly urban variety of lightning.

Architectural photography can involve a lot of waiting; the building becomes a kind of sundial, while you wait for a shadow to crawl away from a detail you want, or for the mass and balance of the structure to reveal itself in a certain way.

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

The color of its skin reminded him of Zone's whores;

Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television.

Maelcum a rude boy," said the other, "an' a righteous tug pilot.

She's right, Kate's right, I'm right and you're wrong. If you drive her away from here it will be over my dead - chair, has it never occurred to you at on one occasion you might be consummately wrong?

He was like a kid who'd grown up beside an ocean, taking it as much for granted as he took the sky, but knowing nothing of currents, shipping routes, or the ins and outs of weather. He'd used decks in school, toys that shuttled you through the infinite reaches of that space that wasn't space, mankind's unthinkably complex consensual hallucination, the matrix, cyberspace, where the great corporate hotcores burned like neon novas, data so dense you suffered sensory overload if you tried to apprehend more than the merest outline.

When I wrote 'Neuromancer', I had a list in my head of all the things the future was assumed to be which it would not be in the book I was about to write. In a sense, I intended 'Neuromancer', among other things, to be a critique of all the aspects of science fiction that no longer satisfied me.

She's learned it's largely a matter of being willing to ask the next question. She's met the very Mexican who first wore his baseball cap backward, asking the next question.

The big news in biology this week was the announcement that we've stopped evolving, in the biological sense. I'll buy that. Technology has stopped us, and technology will take us on, into a new evolution, one Mr. Bush never dreamed of, and neither, I'm sure, have I.

Voytek is here, to fuck penguin.

I have this prejudice that trilogies are long, three-volume novels.

But Leon wasn't due any disability. Wasn't, their mother said, like he could claim to have caught the dumbfuck there. Not

And he could still listen to the far-off plaint of a train horn as the express rolled through the night, wailing through a darkness lit solely by moon and fireflies;

Media'?" "I guess so." "It was an artifact of relatively low connectivity.

I think that our future has lost that capital F we used to spell it with. The science fiction future of my childhood has had a capital F - it was assumed to be an American Future because America was the future. The Future was assumed to be inherently heroic, and a lot of other things, as well.

Case had always taken it for granted that the real bosses, the kingpins in a given industry, would be both more and less than people ... He'd seen it in the men who'd crippled him in Memphis, he'd seen Wage affect the semblance of it in Night City, and it had allowed him to accept Armitrage's flatness and lack of feeling. He'd always imagined it as a gradual and willing accommodation of the machine, the system, the parent organism. It was the root of street cool, too, the knowing posture that implied connection, invisible lines up to hidden levels of influence.

Zion smelled of cooked vegetables, humanity, and ganja.

Case turned back, in time to catch the briefest flash of a black rose, its petals sheened like leather, the black stem thorned with bright chrome.

He looked up at a 1992 calendar, level with his eyes, and about ten inches away. Someone had quit pulling the months off, in August. It advertised a commercial real estate firm, and was decorated with a drastically color-saturated daytime photograph of the New York skyline, complete with the black towers of the World Trade Center. These were so intensely peculiar-looking, in retrospect, so monolithically sci-fi blank, unreal, that they now seemed to Milgrim to have been Photoshopped into every image he encountered them in.

Enlightenment is "being," and it grows; it's end is serenity.

Addictions [ ... ] started out like magical pets, pocket monsters. They did extraordinary tricks, showed you things you hadn't seen, were fun. But came, through some gradual dire alchemy, to make decisions for you. Eventually, they were making your most crucial life-decisions. And they were [ ... ] less intelligent than goldfish.

Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway.

There was a brass plate mounted on the door at eye level, so old that the lettering that had once been engraved there had been reduced to a spidery, unreadable code, the name of some long dead function or functionary, polished into oblivion.

Angie called pause again, rose from the bed, went to the window. She felt an elation, an unexpected sense of strength and inner unity.

Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Dar-
winism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb
permanently on the fast-forward button.

poor Byron, whose car had been run over by an autopiloted eighteen-wheeler on Valentine's Day, about

He'd been numb a long time, years. All his nights down Ninsei, his nights with Linda, numb in bed and numb at the cold sweating center of every drug deal. But now he'd found this warm thing, this chip of murder. Meat, some part of him said. It's the meat talking, ignore it.

Then the snake and the scorpion were gone, and he held a milky plastic syringe in his left hand. " 'If God made anything better, he kept it for himself.' You know the expression, Case?

The whole industry wobbles along like a shopping cart with a missing wheel. You can only keep it moving if you lean on it a certain way and keep pushing, but if you stop, it tips over.

That evil wasn't glamorous, but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room, however that might happen, to become its bigger self. Bigger, with more horrible results, but never more than the cumulative weight of ordinary human baseness.

Zona spat a stream of Spanish that overwhelmed translation, a long and liquid curse.

The future is there," Cayce hears herself say, "looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.

They'd started out as a church, or in a church, not liking anyone being gay or getting abortions or using birth control. Protesting military funerals, which was a thing. Basically they were just assholes, though, and took it as the measure of God's satisfaction with them that everybody else thought they were assholes.

Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking.

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly and at great length. If not for our excessive vanity and our over-active imaginations, novelists might be unusually difficult to deceive.

subgenres are products of the writers' urgent necessity to avoid tangling with a realistic

As individuals steadily lose degrees of privacy, so too do corporations and states.

Case gasped as his internal organs were pulled into a different configuration.

Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky.

You could have sex relatively comfortably on a platform of books, but not on a platform of PDA.s. Hardcover books. Paperbacks might start sliding around. Though I.d still prefer paperbacks to a pile of PDA.s.

She wondered how powerful money could actually be, if one had enough of it, really enough. She supposed that only the Vireks of the world could really know, and very likely they were functionally incapable of knowing; asking Virek would be like interrogating a fish in order to learn more about water.

The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet.

What happened to your arm?" she asked me one night in the Gentleman Loser, the three of us drinking at a small table in a corner.

Hang-gliding," I said, "accident."

Hang-gliding over a wheatfield," said Bobby, "place called Kiev. Our Jack's just hanging there in the dark, under a Nightwing parafoil, with fifty kilos of radar jammed between his legs, and some Russian asshole accidentally burns his arm off with a laser."

I don't remember how I changed the subject, but I did.

I was still telling myself that it wasn't Rikki who getting to me, but what Bobby was doing with her. I'd known him for a long time, since the end of the war, and I knew he used women as counters in a game, Bobby Quine versus fortune, versus time and the night of cities. And Rikki had turned up just when he needed something to get him going, something to aim for. So he'd set her up as a symbol for everything he wanted and couldn't have, everything he'd had and couldn't keep.

I didn't like having to listen to him tell me how much he loved her, and knowing he believed it only made it worse. He was a past master at the hard fall and the rapid recovery, and I'd seen it happen a dozen times before. He might as well have had next printed across his sunglasses in green Day-Glo capitals, ready to flash out at the first interesting face that flowed past the tables in the Gentleman Loser.

I knew what he did to them. He turned them into emblems, sigils

The written word still enjoyed a certain prestige here. It was a sluggish country.

His smile was the nightmare in my back pocket.(Speaking about Ronald Reagan)

In the nearly total darkness of a Nighttown noon, who notices a few dozen mad children lost in the rafters?

a chronic malcontent, albeit quite a purposeless one.

I assume that - because you can get degrees in journalism from very reputable universities - I assume that people can be trained to be journalists. I've never been entirely certain that anyone can be trained to be a novelist in the same way.

The deadliest bullshit is odorless, and transparent.

I don't think about the real future very much.

Know what 'collateral damage' means?" "People get hurt because they happen to be near something that somebody needs to happen?

A middleman's business is to make himself a necessary evil.

Indeed, today, reliance on broadcasting is the very definition of a technologically backward society.

I'm always interested in the spooky repurposing of everyday things.

How it was, when you lost things, it was like you only knew for the first time that you'd ever had them. ( ... ) You didn't wake up every morning and say yes and yes to every little thing. But little things were what it was all made of. Or just somebody to see, there, when you woke up.

Ain't all that simple," he said. "It's everything I been brought up to be. Can't all be bullshit, can it?" Rydell, glancing over at him, took pity. "Naw," he said, "I guess it wouldn't have to be, necessarily, all of it, but it's just - " "What they bring you all up to be, Berry?" Rydell had to think about it. "Republican," he said, finally.

There are no backwaters where things can breed - our connectivity is so high and so global that there are no more Seattles and no more Haight-Ashburys. We've arrived at a level of commodification that may have negated the concept of counterculture.

You needed a new pancreas. The one we bought for you frees you from a dangerous dependency." "Thanks, but I was enjoying that dependency.

Mechanical watches partake of what my friend John Clute calls the Tamagotchi Gesture. They're pointless in a peculiarly needful way; they're comforting precisely because they require tending.

The Thirties dreamed white marble and slip-stream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze, but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming.