William gibson quotes

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

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

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

You must learn to overcome your very natural and appropriate revulsion for your own work.

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.

For years I have been mourning and not for my dead, it is for this boy for whatever corner in my heart died when his childhood slid out of my arms.

"Cyberspace is everting." It's interpenetrating our everyday reality to the point that on-line is our normal waking state.

A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.

You know what your trouble is? You're the kind who always reads the handbook. Anything people build, any kind of technology, it's going to have some specific purpose. It's for doing something that somebody already understands. But if it's new technology, it'll open areas nobody's ever thought of before. You read the manual, man, and you won't play around with it, not the same way. And you get all funny when somebody else uses it to do something you never thought of.

A nation,” he heard himself say, “consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual’s morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation’s laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn’t a nation.

I've always been interested in people who aren't from anywhere in particular. I think it's all melting. This has been true for as long as I can remember in my adult life.

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

I have friends who go [Tokyo] frequently on business, and it sounds interesting. I've heard that they have for the first time serious drug problems.

We're living in a future that's weirder than anybody except possibly.

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

I find it interesting to see people - mostly people who are younger than I am - going to considerable trouble to try to reproduce things from an era that was far more physical, from a less virtual day. That fascinates me, because it seems to be symbolic of something going on in the culture itself, and I also have a sort of innate admiration for the stubbornness it requires to actually make those things physically. It's become incredibly difficult. In North America, we've largely forgotten how to do it.

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.

I realized that everyone in Western society, in some weird way, believes that they've had the experience of producing feature films.

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.

"Authenticity" doesn't mean much to me. I just want "good", in the sense of well-designed, well-constructed, long-lasting garments. My interest in military clothing stems from that. It's not about macho, playing soldiers, anything militaristic. It's the functionality, the design-solutions, the durability. Likewise workwear.

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.

I think that I've always written about things that are very personal, but initially, I coded everything. I buried everything under layers and layers and layers of code, but the signifiers of my emotionality were there for me. I knew where the magnets were, behind the gyprock, and the magnets were very powerful. I think they had to be powerful for me, otherwise the reader wouldn't have a reciprocal experience.

Maybe I've been a small part of the democratisation of celebrity, because I've been fascinated by it, and when it started to happen to me to the very limited extent that it happens to writers in North America, I was exposed to people who had the disease of celebrity. People who had raging, raging, life-threatening celebrity, people who would be in danger if they were left alone on the street without their minders. It's a great anthropological privilege to be there.

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.

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

Somewhere, deep within her, surfaces a tiny clockwork submarine. There are times when you can only take the next step. And then another.

I'm embarrassed if I think anyone knows exactly what I paid for something, or even where I got it. I want what I'm wearing to feel good on, wear well, and to be extremely functional.

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.

I very seldom compose anything in my head which later finds its way into text, except character names sometimes - I'm often very much inspired by things that I misunderstand.

I've gone to big stadium rock concerts at some artist's invitation, and there's this invariable, fascinating and rather sad situation of concentric circles of availability. There are Green Rooms within Green Rooms literally within Green Rooms. There are seven or eight degrees of exclusivity, and within each circle of exclusivity, everyone is so happy to be there, and they don't know that the next level exists.

I think that technologies are morally neutral until we apply them. It's only when we use them for good or for evil that they become good or evil.

Some people dote on contemplating disasters.

Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.

Occasionally if I look back at something I've written I'll find one of those that I don't understand, but that's a bad thing - the unconscious has dealt me a bad hand.

Our hardware is likely to turn into something like us a lot faster than we are likely to turn into something like our hardware...I very much doubt that our grandchildren will understand the distinction between that which is a computer and that which isn't.

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

My problem is that all things are increasingly interesting to me

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

Things aren't different. Things are things.

Generation X is dead. It has come to mean anyone aged 13 to 55 years old.

I think that one of the visions that is closest to reality is the cardboard city in the subway station in Tokyo, which is based very closely on a series of documentary photographs of people living like that and of the contents of the boxes. Those are quite haunting because Tokyo homeless people reiterate the whole nature of living in Tokyo in these cardboard boxes, they're only slightly smaller than Tokyo apartments, and they have almost as many consumer goods. It's a nightmare of boxes within boxes.

Sometimes, I feel like a time traveller, cause the only way that we can really travel in time is just to get older.

I do not think an enormous permanent underclass is a very good thing to have if you're attempting to operate something that at least pretends sometimes to be a democracy.

I think science fiction gives us a wonderful toolkit to disassemble and reexamine this kind of incomprehensible, constantly changing present that we live in, that we often live in quite uncomfortably.

I like living in Vancouver .It's more a matter of being a Vancouver loyalist. Harking back to what I said about growing up with the inherent violence in the southern U.S., I'm deeply enamoured of, and entirely used to living in a society with gun laws akin to those of a Scandinavian social democracy .It's a good thing.

Movies have gotten dull, the way network television got dull. And television, if we can still even call it that, is still really exciting and riveting and people are totally into it. I am always meeting people who have these favorite shows that they are completely wired too and not only have I never seen it but I don't even know how to find it.

Fiction is an illusion wrought with many small, conventionally symbolic marks, triggering visions in the minds of others

Japan had a more radical experience of future shock than any other nation in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. They were this feudal place, locked in the past, but then they bought the whole Industrial Revolution kit from England, blew their cultural brains out with it, became the first industrialized Asian nation, tried to take over their side of the world, got nuked by the United States for their trouble, and discovered Steve McQueen! Their take on iconic menswear emerges from that matrix.

We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.

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.

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

We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition.

I took Punk to be the detonation of some slow-fused projectile buried deep in society's flank a decade earlier, and I took it to be, somehow, a sign.

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.

I find it interesting to see people - mostly people who are younger than I am - going to considerable trouble to try to reproduce things from an era that was far more physical, from a less virtual day.

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.

[The currency of being celebrity] used to be only the elect had any manna in the information society and everyone else was a consumer.

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

There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt. A point at which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is innately media-related.

Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.

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.

People who feel safer with a gun than with guaranteed medical insurance don't yet have a fully adult concept of scary.

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, 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.

The 'Net is a waste of time.

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.

A book exists at the intersection of the author's subconscious and the reader's response.

The prefix cyber is going the way of the prefix electro.

I would like to design what people generally call streetwear. I'd like to dress skateboarders, or whatever the older equivalent of skateboarders are. I pay more attention to that stuff than anyone would ever imagine because I'm watching what the designers do.

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.

I can't imagine writing a book without some strong female characters, unless that was a demand of the setting. I actually tend to suspect that in real life, there have always been very strong female characters, but at certain stages of society, they've been asked to cool it.

It's an American thing, but it's particularly a southern thing, and its romanticization is hyper-Southern. And it's still irresistible to me, even in middle age. There's something that pulls me to that, but at the same time, I have this increasing awareness of how banal it really is - that evil is inherently banal.

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

He took a duck in the face at 250 knots.

I watch for emergent technologies and pay attention to what people say they'll be good for, then see what we actually use them for. It never occurred to me that a tiny telephone with a wireless transceiver would do whatever it is that it's done to us.

I was travelling with Bruce Sterling on our mutual Difference Engine tour and he became aware from the experience of travelling with me that I would distinguish among the shoes in a perfectly normal fashion, but form him it was a revelation. There's a very lyrical passage in Holy Fire about old wealthy European men and their shoes, and how beautiful their shoes are, and how there have never been shoes as beautiful. I think that that was probably as close as Bruce will ever get to homage in my direction. I made him aware of footwear fashion.

The street finds its own uses for things.

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.

When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.

Secrets...are the very root of cool.

I knew where the magnets were, behind the gyprock, and the magnets were very powerful. I think they had to be powerful for me, otherwise the reader wouldn't have a reciprocal experience. But I was very careful to bury them deeply, deeply in the plaster and paint over them. I didn't want anybody to directly access them, and that's gradually changed for me.

We live in an age of seriously crap mass clothing. They've made a science of it.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts.

In effect, I grew up in a sort of timewarp, a place where times are scrambled up. There are elements of my childhood that look to me now, in memory more like the 1940s or the 1950s than the 1960s. Jack [Womack] says that that made us science fiction writers, because we grew up experiencing a kind of time travel.

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.

I wanted to make room for antiheroes.

Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places that had once belonged to cigarettes now belonged to phones.

Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television.

What we're doing pop culturally is like burning the rain forest. The biodiversity of pop culture is really, really in danger.

She walked on, comforted by the surf, by the one perpetual moment of beach-time, the now-and-always of it.

Time is money, but also money is money.

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

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

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.

There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.

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

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

When I come to a new city is I combine: I say, well, it's like Barcelona and Edinburgh, though I can't imagine what that would be. But Toronto, the last few times I've been here, what always comes up is Chicago and West Berlin. It's a big, sprawling city beside a lake, of a certain age and a certain architectural complexity. But the high-end retail core looks more like West Germany than the Magnificent Mile. Yonge Street is like K-Damm. There's an excess of surface marble and bronze: it's Germanic and as pretentious as pretentious can be.

My dream scenario would be that you could go into a bookshop, examine copies of every book in print that they're able to offer, then for a fee have them produce in a minute or two a beautiful finished copy in a dust jacket that you would pay for and take home.

If you’re fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don’t know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one’s own culture.

I buried everything under layers and layers and layers of code, but the signifiers of my emotionality were there, for me.

Laney had recently noticed that the only people who had titles that clearly described their jobs had jobs he wouldn't have wanted.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Genuinely ubiquitous computing spreads like warm Vaseline.

Upon arriving in the capital-F Future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower-case now.

To the extent that I can still believe in Bohemia, which I think is very important to me in some way that I don't yet really understand, to the extent that I still believe in that, I have to believe that there are viable degrees of freedom inherent if not realized in interstitial areas.

Stand high long enough and your lightning will come.

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.

I'm quite good friends with the putative director, Vincenzo Natali, and I'm a big fan of his work, but beyond that, I don't like to talk about other people's work work-in-progress.

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

The experience of celebrity is gradually being democratized.

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

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination.

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

The deadliest bullshit is odorless, and transparent.

There are bits of the literal future right here, right now, if you know how to look for them.

The Internet is part of this ongoing, species-long project we've been working on since we climbed down out of the trees in the savanna. We've been working on it without really knowing it.

The present tense made him nervous.

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.

The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience.

I think I'd probably tell you that it's easier to desire and pursue the attention of tens of millions of total strangers than it is to accept the love and loyalty of the people closest to us.

The future is not Google-able.

Why shouldn't we give our teachers a license to obtain software, all software, any software, for nothing? Does anyone demand a licensing fee, each time a child is taught the alphabet?