Peripheral William Gibson Quotes

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

Case fell into the prison of his own flesh. ~ William Gibson

No," Tessa said, "you've got it exactly backwards. People don't know what they want, not before they see it. Every object of desire is a found object. Traditionally, anyway." Chevette ~ William Gibson

Stand high long enough and your lightning will come. ~ William Gibson

Don't let the little fuckers generation gap you. ~ William Gibson

If ignorance were enough to make things not exist, the world would be more like a lot of people think it is. But it's not. And it's not. ~ William Gibson

Three in the morning.
Making yourself a cup of coffee in the dark, using a flashlight when you pour the boiling water. ~ William Gibson

I had a lot of issues with the genre, and I probably even had issues with the whole idea of genre. I was coming into it with a certain degree of outsider attitude, and I didn't have a long-term plan. But I think the way it's worked out, it's sort of warped into what I suppose you could say is my own genre. If people like my books, they have some idea of what the next one will be like. ~ William Gibson

Be quiet, darling. Let pattern recognition have its way. ~ William Gibson

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. ~ William Gibson

I've become convinced that nostalgia is a fundamentally unhealthy modality. When you see it, it's usually attached to something else that's really, seriously bad. I don't traffic in nostalgia. We're becoming a global culture. ~ William Gibson

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. ~ William Gibson

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

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

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. ~ William Gibson

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. ~ William Gibson

She [Cayce Pollard] feels the things she herself owns as a sort of pressure. Other people's objects exert no pressure. Margot thinks that Cayce has weaned herself from materialism, is preternaturally adult, requiring no external tokens of self. ~ William Gibson

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. ~ William Gibson

Lucas knows, yeah. The last seven, eight years, there's been funny stuff out there, out on the console cowboy circuit. The new jockeys, they make deals with things, don't they, Lucas? Yeah, you bet I know; they still need the hard and the soft, and they still gotta be faster than snakes on ice, but all of 'em, all the ones who really know how to cut it, they got allies, don't they, Lucas? ~ William Gibson

He saw Case and smiled, his teeth a webwork of East European steel and brown decay. ~ William Gibson

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. ~ William Gibson

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

Really, my artiste, you amaze me. The lengths you will go to in order to accomplish your own destruction. The redundancy of it! In Night City, you had it, in the palm of your hand! The speed to eat your sense away, drink to keep it all so fluid, Linda for a sweeter sorrow, and the street to hold the axe. How far you've come, to do it now, and what grotesque props. . . . Playgrounds hung in space, castles hermetically sealed, the rarest rots of old Europa, dead men sealed in little boxes, magic out of China. . . . ~ William Gibson

Drug deficiency. It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke. The Chatsubo was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there for a week and never hear two words in Japanese. ~ William Gibson

Case shuffled into the nearest door and watched the other passengers as he rode. A pair of predatory-looking Christian Scientists were edging toward a trio of young office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on their wrists, wet pink glittering under the harsh lighting. The techs licked their perfect lips nervously and eyed the Christian Scientists from beneath lowered metallic lids. The girls looked like tall, exotic grazing animals, swaying gracefully and unconsciously with the movement of the train, their high heels like polished hooves against the gray metal of the car's floor. Before they could stampede, take flight from the missionaries, the train reached Case's station. ~ William Gibson

THEY ATE LUNCH in a Mexican place called Dirty Is God. ~ William Gibson

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 ~ William Gibson

His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. ~ William Gibson

But, Hubertus," Cayce offers, "what if Dorothea is..."
"Yes?" He leans forward, palms flat on the table.
"A vicious lying cunt?"
Bigend giggles, a deeply alarming sound. "Well," he says, "we are in the business of advertising, after all." He smiles. ~ William Gibson

This perpetual toggling between nothing being new, under the sun, and everything having very recently changed, absolutely, is perhaps the central driving tension of my work. ~ William Gibson

In the early '80s, I happened to find myself in the vicinity of people who would work for Microsoft five years later. ~ William Gibson

Something he'd found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew – he remembered – as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read. ~ William Gibson

A sense of the Finn's presence surrounded him, smell of Cuban cigarettes, smoke locked in musty tweed, old machines given up to the mineral rituals of rust. ~ William Gibson

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

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

A pair of predatory-looking Christian Scientists were edging toward a trio of young office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on their wrists, wet pink glittering under the harsh lighting. The ~ William Gibson

The future's here already. It's just unevenly distributed. ~ William Gibson

This is without subtlety, he said, as if to himself. His voice was cool and pleasant. His every move was part of a dance, a dance that never ended, even when his body was still, at rest, but for all the power it suggested, there was also a humility, an open simplicity. ~ William Gibson

All we really have when we pretend to write about the future is the moment in which we are writing. That's why every imagined future obsoletes like an ice cream melting on the way back from the corner store. ~ William Gibson

But the mind had its own ideas, and Kihn's opinion of what I was already thinking of as my "sighting" rattled endlessly, through my head in a tight, lopsided orbit. Semiotic ghosts. ~ William Gibson

All I knew about the word cyberspace when I coined it, was that it seemed like an effective buzzword. It seemed evocative and essentially meaningless. It was suggestive of something, but had no real semantic meaning, even for me, as I saw it emerge on the page. ~ William Gibson

I knew he used women as counters in a game, Bobby Quine 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. ~ William Gibson

thin and elegant as a mantis ~ William Gibson

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? ~ William Gibson

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

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

To hire someone willing to undertake an unspecified task, likely involving violence. ~ William Gibson

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. ~ William Gibson