William Gibson Quotes
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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.
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If I were in severely straitened socio-economic circumstances and had to move to the U.S., I'd probably opt for Athens, GA, or Lawrence, KS. As boho guys usually do, live cheap in the Left Bank of Kansas.
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It seems as though everyone is going to the currency of celebrity. Everyone's getting their own account of whatever that currency is. That's something neat.
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To the very limited extent that I have a political consciousness, to some extent I'm a lazy, apolitical sort of guy that just flits around.
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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.
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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.
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There's an idea called "gray man", in the security business, that I find interesting. They teach people to dress unobtrusively. Chinos instead of combat pants, and if you really need the extra pockets, a better design conceals them. They assume, actually, that the bad guys will shoot all the guys wearing combat pants first, just to be sure.
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I'm not the only one: witness Pokemon! They still keep coming up with this stuff that just rivets us in unexpected areas.
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My problem is that all things are increasingly interesting to me
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Upon arriving in the capital-F Future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower-case now.
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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.
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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.
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The experience of celebrity is gradually being democratized.
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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.
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"Cyberspace is everting." It's interpenetrating our everyday reality to the point that on-line is our normal waking state.
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Cyberspace is where you are when you're on the telephone.
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The street finds its own uses for things.
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Hollis thought he looked like William Burroughs, minus the bohemian substrate (or perhaps the methadone). Like someone who'd be invited quail shooting with the vice-president, though too careful to get himself shot.
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The 'Net is a waste of time.
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Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking.
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If I meet someone and discover that they're an absolute, very earnest nationalist, it's unlikely that I'm going to get much closer to them. I don't understand them. It doesn't matter where they're from, I just don't get it. I'm a multi-national kind of guy.
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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.
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Futurists get to a certain age and, as one does, they suddenly recognize their own mortality.
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I'd always maintained that much of the anarchy and craziness of the early internet had a lot to do with the fact that governments just hadn't realised it was there.