William Gibson Quotes
-
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.
-
I'm not the only one: witness Pokemon! They still keep coming up with this stuff that just rivets us in unexpected areas.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The experience of celebrity is gradually being democratized.
-
My problem is that all things are increasingly interesting to me
-
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.
-
"Cyberspace is everting." It's interpenetrating our everyday reality to the point that on-line is our normal waking state.
-
I think with one exception I've never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed.
-
Cyberspace is where you are when you're on the telephone.
-
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.
-
The street finds its own uses for things.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The 'Net is a waste of time.
-
Upon arriving in the capital-F Future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower-case now.
-
I very seldom compose anything in my head which later finds its way into text, except character names sometimes - I'm often very much inspired by things that I misunderstand.
-
I've been interested in autism since I've known about it, which is more or less since I've been writing.
-
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.
-
You needed a new pancreas. The one we bought for you frees you from a dangerous dependency.” “Thanks, but I was enjoying that dependency.
-
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.