William Gibson Quotes
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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.
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If ignorance were enough to make things not exist, the world would be more like a lot of people think it is. But it's not. And it's not.
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Our hardware is likely to turn into something like us a lot faster than we are likely to turn into something like our hardware...I very much doubt that our grandchildren will understand the distinction between that which is a computer and that which isn't.
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Stand high long enough and your lightning will come.
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We're living in a future that's weirder than anybody except possibly.
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I would like to design what people generally call streetwear. I'd like to dress skateboarders, or whatever the older equivalent of skateboarders are. I pay more attention to that stuff than anyone would ever imagine because I'm watching what the designers do.
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When did it become necessary to explain what's so cool about Japan? Everyone was quite obsessed with it 15 years ago. I suppose it's the only Asian country that developed an imaginary entree to me. That's why I go back.
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I loved the Limey [movie]! It's so violent! And yet it's so exquisitely romanticized in a sort of Japanese way, it's a samurai film. Coming out of that, I was really deeply conflicted, because a friend who had seen it said, it's beautiful, but it's not about anything. it's one micron thick.
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The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.
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All we really have when we pretend to write about the future is the moment in which we are writing. That's why every imagined future obsoletes like an ice cream melting on the way back from the corner store.
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If you’re fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don’t know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one’s own culture.
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I don't think we know yet what broadcast television did to us, although it obviously did lots. I don't think we're far enough away from it yet to really get a handle on it. We get these things, I think they start changing us right away, we don't notice we're changing. Our perception of the whole thing shifts, and then we're in the new way of doing things, and we take it for granted.
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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?
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Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places that had once belonged to cigarettes now belonged to phones.
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Sometimes, I feel like a time traveller, cause the only way that we can really travel in time is just to get older.
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Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description.
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"Authenticity" doesn't mean much to me. I just want "good", in the sense of well-designed, well-constructed, long-lasting garments. My interest in military clothing stems from that. It's not about macho, playing soldiers, anything militaristic. It's the functionality, the design-solutions, the durability. Likewise workwear.
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The future is there," Cayce hears herself say, "looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.
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Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.
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I suppose I do the Japanese because I just don't know China. Chinese popular culture has never evoked that instant of, "Whoah! What's that?" that I have with Japanese popular culture.
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I can't imagine writing a book without some strong female characters, unless that was a demand of the setting. I actually tend to suspect that in real life, there have always been very strong female characters, but at certain stages of society, they've been asked to cool it.
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As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair.
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People who feel safer with a gun than with guaranteed medical insurance don't yet have a fully adult concept of scary.
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Generation X is dead. It has come to mean anyone aged 13 to 55 years old.