William Gibson Quotes
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The future's here already. It's just unevenly distributed.
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That's something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: The most interesting applications turn up on a battlefield, or in a gallery.
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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.
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To some extent I'm guilty of wishful thinking. The absence of the interstitial I find unbearable.
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Genuinely ubiquitous computing spreads like warm Vaseline.
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When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.
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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.
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I don't think about the real future very much.
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Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky.
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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.
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What strikes me about Toronto is that Toronto's great misfortune was to have too much money in the late 70s and early 80s, and consequently, it built in the style of those periods, which is hideous.
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I don't begin a novel with a shopping list - the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A book exists at the intersection of the author's subconscious and the reader's response.
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Some people dote on contemplating disasters.
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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.
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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.
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He took a duck in the face at 250 knots.
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Part of the core of my system, is a way of trying to give the characters more control. If I'm practicing making up what the characters will do, it's never good. In fact, when I catch myself doing that, I try to get rid of that section, and try and let them start making the decisions.
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I've never actually been a collector. I like the learning-curve, but I buy things, sell them to finance other things.
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The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead station.
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Time is money, but also money is money.