Top 257 Quotes & Sayings by William Gibson - Page 3

The present tense made him nervous.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination.

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.

It was hot, the night we burned Chrome.

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

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

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

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.

One of the things I have taken for granted, in terms of how technology works in the world, is the people that develop it and get it out there don't really know what we are going to do with until we have really gotten ahold of it and it has become ubiquitous. And then we wind up doing things that its inventors never dreamed of and those things become the real change drivers. That is actually where the whole technocracy thing falls apart for me, because the people who invented it can't predict what we're going to do with it.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing.

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

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.

Secrets...are the very root of cool.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I only go to Japan when there's someone who can afford to bring me there, and consequently I may never go again!

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.

I'm not the only one: witness Pokemon! They still keep coming up with this stuff that just rivets us in unexpected areas.

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 watch a sort of primitive form of the recommodification machine around my friends and myself in sixties, and it took about two years for this clumsy mechanism to get and try to sell us The Monkees. In 1977, it took about eight months for a slightly faster more refined mechanism to put punk in the window of Holt Renfrew. It's gotten faster ever since. The scene in Seattle that Nirvana came from: as soon as it had a label, it was on the runways of Paris.There's no grace period, so that's a way in which I see us losing the interstitial.

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

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

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.

I'm not a very intentional writer. I try to be as unintentional as possible. What I basically try to do is invite the zeitgeist in to tea.

I can see television much more easily than I can see features, because the economy and politics of making big, big features seems to me to be narrowing even from what it was.

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.

[When] Johnny Mnemonic was coming out and I realized that all the kids that worked in 7-11 knew more - or thought they knew more - about feature film production than I did. And that was from reading Premiere, that was from this change that came from magazines that treat their readers as players. Magazines that purport to sell you the inside experience.

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.

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.

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

When I start writing a new imaginary future, I have no idea what it is. The characters arrive first. They help me figure out where they are living and I get to fill in the gaps with that and where we are. So when I get to the end of the process of composition, if I feel that I have really done my job, I have no idea what I've got - and I then spend essentially the rest of my life figuring out what it might mean.

I look at [Toronto] and think well, perhaps my grandchildren will someday look at this stuff with the sort of appreciation I once held for Art Deco. Although I've come to find Art Deco quite creepy too.

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

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

I worry about what we'll do in the future, [about the instantaneous co-opting of pop culture]. Where is our new stuff going to come from?

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.

Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television.

She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.

You can get in a cab in Vancouver and the 20-year-old driver speaks more knowingly of Michael Ovitz than anyone in the industry. They just know! And it's perhaps not unhealthy.

The nature of emergent technology is, as Kevin Kelly once said, right out of control. It's an element of human evolution that's completely out of control. It's sort of driving itself, and I don't see it ceasing to do that.

Damien is a friend. Their boy-girl Lego doesn't click, he would say.

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

I have always been intensely uncomfortable with the idea of a science fiction writer as prophet. Not that there haven't been science fiction writers who think of themselves as having some sort of prophetic role, but when I think of that, I always think of H.G. Wells - he would think of what was going to happen, and he would imagine how it would happen, and then he would create a fiction to illustrate the idea that he'd had. And no part of my process has ever resembled that at all.

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.

I wanted to make room for antiheroes.

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.

I've always assumed from the beginning that I had relatively few contemporaries among my readership. Not that I was consciously writing for a younger audience but that what I was doing interested a younger audience, or at least threatened them less.

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.

Magazines in the traditional sense were aggregators of novelty. A good magazine was a lot of novelty, stuff you've never heard of before, clearly aggregated by people who have been able to travel further and dig deeper than you have been able to do. And that used to be really an important source of stuff for me. And now it is less important because the Internet has eaten it all up. But my Twitter feed as an aggregator of novelty is like... I don't know what I would do if it became any more powerful, I would have to start reining it in somehow.

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.

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