William Gibson Quotes
-
She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.
-
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.
-
The ecological impact of book manufacture and traditional book marketing - I think that should really be considered. We have this industry in which we cut down trees to make the paper that we then use enormous amounts of electricity to turn into books that weigh a great deal and are then shipped enormous distances to point-of-sale retail.
-
It doesn't matter how fast your modem is if you're being shelled by ethnic separatists.
-
I took Punk to be the detonation of some slow-fused projectile buried deep in society's flank a decade earlier, and I took it to be, somehow, a sign.
-
I watch a sort of primitive form of the recommodification machine around my friends and myself in sixties, and it took about two years for this clumsy mechanism to get and try to sell us The Monkees. In 1977, it took about eight months for a slightly faster more refined mechanism to put punk in the window of Holt Renfrew. It's gotten faster ever since. The scene in Seattle that Nirvana came from: as soon as it had a label, it was on the runways of Paris.There's no grace period, so that's a way in which I see us losing the interstitial.
-
Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.
-
'Cyberspace' as a term is sort of over. It's over in the way that, after a certain time, people stopped using the suffix '-electro' to make things cool, because everything was electrical. 'Electro' was all over the early 20th century, and now it's gone. I think 'cyber' is sort of the same way.
-
Magazines in the traditional sense were aggregators of novelty. A good magazine was a lot of novelty, stuff you've never heard of before, clearly aggregated by people who have been able to travel further and dig deeper than you have been able to do. And that used to be really an important source of stuff for me. And now it is less important because the Internet has eaten it all up. But my Twitter feed as an aggregator of novelty is like... I don't know what I would do if it became any more powerful, I would have to start reining it in somehow.
-
It's an American thing, but it's particularly a southern thing, and its romanticization is hyper-Southern. And it's still irresistible to me, even in middle age. There's something that pulls me to that, but at the same time, I have this increasing awareness of how banal it really is - that evil is inherently banal.
-
Art Deco for me except in its most crazed and attenuated forms, it's jut a matter of taste.
-
I've gone to big stadium rock concerts at some artist's invitation, and there's this invariable, fascinating and rather sad situation of concentric circles of availability. There are Green Rooms within Green Rooms literally within Green Rooms. There are seven or eight degrees of exclusivity, and within each circle of exclusivity, everyone is so happy to be there, and they don't know that the next level exists.
-
I don't think of myself as being particulary a subversive writer, but I like to think that my work could afford someone else, the extra degree of freedom that I found when I first found science fiction.
-
I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity.
-
For years I have been mourning and not for my dead, it is for this boy for whatever corner in my heart died when his childhood slid out of my arms.
-
I don't have to write about the future. For most people, the present is enough like the future to be pretty scary.
-
All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he'd cut in Night City, and still he'd see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void.
-
The future is there... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.
-
I think science fiction gives us a wonderful toolkit to disassemble and reexamine this kind of incomprehensible, constantly changing present that we live in, that we often live in quite uncomfortably.
-
I worry about what we'll do in the future, [about the instantaneous co-opting of pop culture]. Where is our new stuff going to come from?
-
To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing.
-
We don't legislate emergent technologies into existence. We almost never do. They just emerge, dragged forth by Adam Smith's invisible hand. Then we have to see what people are actually going to do with them, and try to legislate to take account of that.
-
I have this prejudice that trilogies are long, three-volume novels.
-
If there's a movie of Neuromancer, what I really want the special effects guys to do is make you see, from Case's point of view, the little acid giggies: the little lines and trails coming off of things.