William Gibson Quotes
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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.
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Some people dote on contemplating disasters.
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The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead station.
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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.
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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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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.
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The written word still enjoyed a certain prestige here. It was a sluggish country.
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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.
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I grew up in southwestern Virginia. I was born in South Carolina, but only because my parents had a vacation cabin or something there on the beach. I was like a summer baby. But I did grow up in the South. I grew up in serious, serious Appalachia, in a very small town.
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His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol.
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Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination.
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It was hot, the night we burned Chrome.
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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.
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I've been through the whole western world, and it seems to me that there's more retail floor space devoted to the sale of books than food! There's more retail floor space devoted to the sale of books than there's been in the entire history of humanity! It's grotesque!
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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.
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Gadgets are usually the last thing I think about, and if there's something new, I'll get to the store for the final shipment of the first generation when it's on sale. So I have last year's stuff.
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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.
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Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.
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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.
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You must learn to overcome your very natural and appropriate revulsion for your own work.
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I feel like I've been very fortunate in that I've stuck like a burr to the dog-leg of the next generation of nerdism. I've been carried into the XXIth century on Bill Gates' pants-cuff.
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Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts.
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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.
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A lot of the buildings [in Toronto] around Yonge and Bloor is the architectural equivalent of Kipper Ties and 8" collar points. It's ghastly and no amount of street-level retail glitz can lift it.