William Gibson Quotes

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.

William Gibson

• Writing
• Done
• Character
• Mean

• Previous
• Next

Quotes to Explore

• I think 'North by Northwest' and 'Rope' and Rear Window' and 'Psycho' are on my list of favorite all time movies. I just think his kind of command as a director was almost unparalleled, and I feel like in certain ways the sort of character-based thriller owes more to Hitchcock than anyone.

  

  Carlton Cuse
  • Time
  • Character
  • Think

• I read my books to writing workshops and friends, and I'm often focussed just on keeping them entertained. I never think about marketing at all.

  

  Karen Joy Fowler
  • Writing
  • Friends
  • Marketing

• Sometimes it's less about the character and more about the story for me. I'll play a rock in the background if I think the story is fantastic and I can be a part of it somehow. That's what I look for.

  

  Zoe Kravitz
  • Character
  • Play
  • Rock

• Wit is the appearance, the external flash of imagination. Thus its divinity, and the witty character of mysticism.

  

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
  • Character
  • Imagination
  • Witty

• Some of the regrets I've had about my own career are things I have not done that I should have done. More than some of the things that I've done.

  

  Samuel Goldwyn, Jr.
  • Done
  • Career
  • Own

• I want to do everything in the world that can be done.

  

  Fanny Kemble
  • World
  • Done
  • Want

• Historical fiction is actually good preparation for reading SF. Both the historical novelist and the science fiction writer are writing about worlds unlike our own.

  

  Pamela Sargent
  • Good
  • Writing
  • Science

• My highest point was the first thing I won, a short story competition in a women's magazine in the Eighties. It was the first time I'd had my writing validated, and the first thing I'd ever shown anyone else.

  

  Kate Atkinson
  • Time
  • Writing
  • Women

• And while I might not always agree with the viewpoint I have to portray, because I play a district attorney, as an actress I can always tell myself that my character is trying to take the moral high ground.

  

  Lara Flynn Boyle
  • Trying
  • Character
  • High

• You're trying to put yourself in that moment and trying to prepare yourself, to have a 'memory before the game. I don't know if you'd call it visualising or dreaming, but I've always done it, my whole life.

  

  Wayne Rooney
  • Life
  • Trying
  • Done

• I am truly at my happiest not when I am writing an aria for an actor or making a grand political or social point. I am at my happiest when I've figured out a fun way for somebody to slip on a banana peel.

  

  Aaron Sorkin
  • Writing
  • Fun
  • Political

• Libertarianism is a way of measuring how the government and other kinds of systems respect the individual. At the core of libertarianism is the idea that the individual is sacrosanct and that anything that's done contrary to the well-being of the individual needs some pretty serious justification.

  

  P. J. O'Rourke
  • Done
  • Pretty
  • Respect

• In high school, I was doing my magazine 'Rookie' and a lot of writing, and I became a little less interested in the fashion world. I was approached by an agent for writing, and I said I wanted to act as well. They sent me scripts, and then I got my first Broadway play, 'This Is Our Youth'.

  

  Tavi Gevinson
  • World
  • Writing
  • School

• I worked with Ismail Merchant on 'The Mystic Masseur,' I did 'Sakina's Restaurant,' I've done plays, I've been on Broadway, I've done movies, I've done TV... but nothing has had the pop culture penetrative impact as 'The Daily Show' has. It's the nature of the beast.

  

  Aasif Mandvi
  • Done
  • Nature
  • Culture

• My favorite thing in life is writing about life, specifically the parts of life concerning love. Because, as far as I'm concerned, love is absolutely everything.

  

  Taylor Swift
  • Life
  • Writing
  • Love Is

• I have some great stories and I will get around to writing a book.

  

  Sally Kirkland
  • Great
  • Writing
  • Book

• Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have.

  

  Walter Pater
  • Done
  • Art
  • Help

• I respect people who can do both careers, like Will Smith and a couple of other people who have done it, but I just don't know when they sleep.

  

  Val Kilmer
  • People
  • Done
  • Respect

• I'm trying to do what I have never done - give the impression one has on entering a room: one sees everything and at the same time nothing.

  

  Pierre Bonnard
  • Time
  • Trying
  • Done

• A man in love will jump to pick up a glove or a bouquet for a silly girl of sixteen, whilst at home he will permit his aged mother to carry pails of water and armfuls of wood, or his wife to lug a twenty-pound baby, hour after hour, without ever offer.

  

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton
  • Girl
  • Wife
  • Water

• When you're pregnant, people feel like they can come up and give you unsolicited advice. When I was nine months pregnant, this one woman came up and she said, I have one word for you: epidural. And I was like, Oh my God, thanks. But we already picked a name.

  

  Bonnie McFarlane
  • Woman
  • Advice
  • Name

• If we trace the history of any nation backwards into the past, we come at last to a period of myths and traditions which eventually fade away into impenetrable darkness.

  

  Bal Gangadhar Tilak
  • History
  • Past
  • Period

• 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.

  

  William Gibson
  • Writing
  • Done
  • Character