William Gibson Quotes

Genuinely ubiquitous computing spreads like warm Vaseline. ~ William Gibson

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. ~ William Gibson

I'm happiest with people who've gotten furthest from traditional ideas of nationalism. ~ William Gibson

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

He took a duck in the face at 250 knots. ~ William Gibson

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. ~ William Gibson

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. ~ William Gibson

When I began to write fiction that I knew would be published as science fiction, [and] part of what I brought to it was the critical knowledge that science fiction was always about the period in which it was written. ~ William Gibson

That's something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: The most interesting applications turn up on a battlefield, or in a gallery. ~ 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

The yellow Lego was brick-shaped again. Pretending innocence. ~ William Gibson

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

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. ~ William Gibson

Conspiracy theory's got to be simple. Sense doesn't come into it. People are more scared of how complicated shit actually is than they ever are about whatever's supposed to be behind the conspiracy. ~ William Gibson

It seemed that it was changing subtly, cooking itself down under the pressure of time, silent invisible flakes settling to form a mulch, a crystalline essence of discarded technology, flowering secretly in the Sprawl's waste places. ~ William Gibson

Which had a top layer of truth to it, but latticed, like the caramel on the cronuts. ~ William Gibson

Chia decided to change the subject. "What's your brother like? How old is he?" "Masahiko is seventeen," Mitsuko said. "He is a 'pathological - techno - fetishist - with - social - deficit," ' this last all strung together like one word, indicating a concept that taxed the lexicon of the ear-clips. Chia wondered briefly if it would be worth running it through her Sandbenders, whose translation functions updated automatically whenever she ported. "A what?" "Otaku," Mitsuko said carefully in Japanese. ~ William Gibson

History had its fascinations, but could be burdensome. ~ William Gibson

He disliked the narrative aspects of history, particularly that part of it. People were so boringly deformed by it, like Ash, or else, like Lev, scarcely aware of it. ~ William Gibson

I don't have to write about the future. For most people, the present is enough like the future to be pretty scary. ~ William Gibson

I like the idea of people who've had some success in one form secretly wanting to be something else; I have some of that myself. I look for it in other people who've established themselves in some particular art form, and then you find out that they really would like to design running shoes, or edit literary magazines or something. ~ William Gibson

I'm interested in people who become culturally fluent. And when I meet young people I'm often amazed they don't quite seem to have a sense of where they're from. They're like the citizens of the airport. ~ 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

Had me this boy once. You kinda remind me . . ." She turned and surveyed the corridor. "Johnny, his name was. ~ William Gibson

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

As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair. ~ William Gibson

ADVENTURE CAPITALISTS ~ William Gibson

She's spoken with Parkaboy twice before, and both times it's been odd, in the way that initial telephone conversations with people you've gotten to know well on the Net, yet have never met, are odd. She ~ William Gibson

The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet. - WILLIAM GIBSON, ~ Timothy Ferriss

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

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

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

It's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. ~ William Gibson

Something she'd gotten from Burton and the Corps, that you didn't do things in the clothes you sat around in. You got yourself squared away, then your intent did too. ~ William Gibson

I think with one exception I've never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed. ~ William Gibson

His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass spines. ~ William Gibson

Singaporeans seemed generally quite loathe to discuss these more intimate policies of government with a curious foreign visitor who was more than twice as tall as the average human, and who sweated slowly but continuously, like and aged cheese. ~ William Gibson

None of them knowing that that was Rez hunched down in there, under a jacket, but maybe sensing it somehow. And something in Chia letting her know she'd never quite be like that again. Never as comfortably a face in that crowd. Because now she knew there were rooms they never saw, or even dreamed of, where crazy things, or even just boring things, happened, and that was where the stars came from. ~ William Gibson

Shit," she said, small hand gesturing to encompass their situation. "Lots of it. Now. Hitting many fans. Large ones. ~ William Gibson

The Thirties had seen the first generation of American industrial designers; until the Thirties, all pencil sharpeners looked like pencil sharpeners - your basic Victorian mechanism, perhaps with a curlicue of decorative trim. After the advent of the designers, some pencil sharpeners looked as though they'd been put together in wind tunnels. For the most part, the change was only skin-deep; under the streamlined chrome shell, you'd find the same Victorian mechanism. Which made a certain kind of sense, because the most successful American designers had been recruited from the ranks of Broadway theater designers. It was all a stage set, a series of elaborate props for playing at living in the future. ~ William Gibson

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

If god made anything better, he kept it for himself ~ William Gibson

I don't always like writing, but I very much like having written. ~ William Gibson

They had remained silent during the trial, their leader stating only that the disease was God's vengeance on sinners and the unclean. Lean men with shaven heads and blank, implacable eyes, they were God's gunmen, and would stare, as such, from all the tapes of history, forever. But ~ William Gibson

The street finds its own uses for things. ~ William Gibson

I was afraid to watch 'Blade Runner' in the theater because I was afraid the movie would be better than what I myself had been able to imagine. In a way, I was right to be afraid, because even the first few minutes were better. ~ William Gibson

It took a month for the gestalt of drugs and tension he moved through to turn those perpetually startled eyes into wells of reflexive need. He'd watched her personality fragment, calving like an iceberg, splinters drifting away, and finally he'd seen the raw need, the hungry armature of addiction. ~ William Gibson

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. ~ William Gibson

I'm a really good eavesdropper. I listen to what people say and remember all the buzzwords. ~ William Gibson

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

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

The bartender's smile widened. His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it. ~ William Gibson

Freeside is Las Vegas and the hanging gardens of Babylon, an orbital Geneva and home to a family inbred and most carefully refined, the industrial clan of Tessier and Ashpool. ~ William Gibson

Science fiction writers aren't fortune tellers. Fortune tellers are fakes. ~ William Gibson

Slick stayed where he was, looking up at Gentry's pale eyes, gray in this light, his taut face. Why did he put up with Gentry anyway? Because you needed somebody, in the Solitude. Not just for electricity; that whole landlord routine was really just a shuck. He guessed because you needed somebody around. ~ William Gibson

I think the large part of the function of the Internet is it is archival. It's unreliable to the extent that word on the street is unreliable. It's no more unreliable than that. You can find the truth on the street if you work at it. I don't think of the Internet or the virtual as being inherently inferior to the so-called real. ~ William Gibson

The act of connection produces a fork in causality, the new branch causally unique. A stub, as we call them. ~ William Gibson

The expensive-looking thing in her hand resembled a cross between a miniature oar and an orthopedic brace. She was off for a fast game of something, but Case had no idea what. ~ William Gibson

Tokyu Hands assumes that the customer is very serious about something. If that happens to be shining a pair of shoes, and the customer is sufficiently serious about it, he or she may need the very best German sole-edge enamel available - for the museum-grade weekly restoration of the sides of the soles. ~ William Gibson

Destiny spelled out in a constellation of cheap chrome. ~ William Gibson

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

The machine, the structure, was there, was real. Virek's money was a sort of universal solvent, dissolving barriers to his will . . . ~ William Gibson

Television has - particularly at the HBO level in the United States - become a completely new genre. Something like Deadwood or The Wire is a whole new thing - there was no equivalent to that medium before. It's like a new way of telling stories. ~ 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

Zion smelled of cooked vegetables, humanity, and ganja. ~ William Gibson

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

All the meat, he thought, and all it wants. ~ William Gibson

I'm often saddened and dismayed to see myself portrayed as either a Luddite or as a raving technophile. I've always thought that my job was to be as anthropologically neutral about emerging technologies as possible. ~ 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

Whenever the media do try to pick it up, it slides like a lone noodle from their chopsticks. ~ William Gibson

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. ~ William Gibson

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

There must always be room for coincidence, Win had maintained. When there's not, you're probably well into apophenia, each thing then perceived as part of an overarching pattern of conspiracy. And while comforting yourself with the symmetry of it all, he'd believed, you stood all too real a chance of missing the genuine threat, which was invariably less symmetrical, less perfect. But which he always ... took for granted was there. ~ William Gibson

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. ~ William Gibson

So you see, Case, you need us. You need us as badly as you did when we scraped you up from the gutter. ~ William Gibson

Do you always wear Malaysian imitations of Brooks Brothers blue oxford button-downs, Mr. Laney?"

Laney had looked down at his shirt, or tried to.

"Malaysia?"

"The stitch-count's dead on, but they still haven't mastered the thread-tension."

"Oh."

"Never mind. A little prototypic nerd chic could actually lend a certain frisson, around here. You could lose the tie, though. Definitely lose the tie. And keep a collection of felt-tipped pens in your pocket. Unchewed, please. Plus one of those fat flat highlighters, in a really nasty fluorescent shade."

"Are you joking?"

"Probably, Mr. Laney. May I call you Colin?"

"Yes."

She never did call him "Colin," then or ever. "You'll find that humor is essential at Slitscan, Laney. A necessary survival tool. You'll find the type that's most viable here is fairly oblique."

"How do you mean, Ms. Torrance?"

"Kathy. I mean difficult to quote effectively in a memo. Or a court of law. ~ William Gibson

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

Her four pupils bored into his, her white face perfectly immobile. "Altruism? What's happening to you?" "I don't know," he said. ~ William Gibson

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. ~ William Gibson

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. ~ William Gibson

Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television. ~ William Gibson

Until I was 16, I read nothing but science fiction. I loved William Gibson and I still do. But my favourite book when I was growing up, for a long time, was 'Snow Crash' by Neal Stephenson, which I must have read about a dozen times when I was a teenager. ~ Ned Beauman

The factory might have given us the millionfold productivity increases that yielded the Industrial Revolution, but it achieved those gains by chaining us to machines, deskilling the artisan and turning him into a cog in the factory, stripped of judgment and dignity and disconnected from the rhythms of his spirit and the world around him. ~ William Gibson

One of the liberating effects of science fiction when I was a teenager was precisely its ability to tune me into all sorts of strange data and make me realize that I wasn't as totally isolated in perceiving the world as being monstrous and crazy ~ William Gibson

How could she have imagined that it would be possible to live, to move, in the unnatural field of Virek's wealth without suffering distortion? Virek had taken her up, in all her misery, and had rotated her through the monstrous, invisible stresses of his money, and she had been changed. ~ William Gibson

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

Factual accounts of premeditated violence in the global fashion industry. ~ William Gibson

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

I love science fiction. I always have, ever since I was a kid. I love a lot of science fiction writers. William Gibson is one of my favorite writers. ~ Tahmoh Penikett

His vision crawled with ghost hieroglyphs, translucent lines of symbols arranging themselves against the neutral backdrop of the bunker wall. He looked at the backs of his hands, saw faint neon molecules crawling beneath the skin, ordered by the unknowable code. He raised his right hand and moved it experimentally. It left a faint, fading trail of strobed afterimages. ~ William Gibson

And the Flatline aligned the nose of Kuang's sting with the center of the dark below. And dove. Case's sensory input warped with their velocity. His mouth filled with an aching taste of blue. His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sounds of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine spines. The spines split, bisected, split again, exponential growth under the dome of the Tessier-Ashpool ice. ~ William Gibson

We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self. ~ William Gibson

Things were launching themselves from the ornate sunburst spires, glittering leech shapes made of shifting planes of light. There were hundreds of them, rising in a whirl, their movements random as windblown paper down dawn streets. "Glitch systems," the voice said. ~ William Gibson

Neighborhoods that mainly operated at night had a way of looking a lot worse in the morning. ~ William Gibson

Home.
Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis.
Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta ... ~ William Gibson

Things aren't different. Things are things. ~ William Gibson

What you need to remember, with these guys, is that they don't know they're con men. They're wildly overconfident. Omnipotence, omniscience
that's part of the mythology that surrounds the Special Forces ... Your guy can walk in the door and promise training in something he personally doesn't know how to do, and not even realize he's bullshitting about his own capabilities. It's a special kind of gullibility ... ~ William Gibson

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. ~ William Gibson

Cyberspace is colonising what we used to think of as the real world. I think that our grandchildren will probably regard the distinction we make between what we call the real world and what they think of as simply the world as the quaintest and most incomprehensible thing about us. ~ William Gibson

I very much doubt that our grandchildren will understand the distinction between that which is a computer and that which isn't. Or, to put it another way, they will not know "computers" as any distinct category of object or function. This, I think, is the logical outcome of genuinely ubiquitous computing: the wired world. The wired world will consist, in effect, of a single unbroken interface. The ~ William Gibson