William Gibson Quotes
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The designers [of the 1930s] were populists, you see; they were trying to give the public what it wanted. What the public wanted was the future.
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I think that I've always written about things that are very personal, but initially, I coded everything.
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I had a list of things that science fiction, particularly American science fiction, to me seemed to do with tedious regularity. One was to not have strong female protagonists. One was to envision the future, whatever it was, as America.
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We're living in a future that's weirder than anybody except possibly.
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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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A part of that [timewrap] for me was growing up in a culture that violence had always been a part of. It wasn't an aberration, though I realize that in retrospect. I grew up in the part of the U.S. where all of Cormac McCarthy's novels are set and that's a pretty violent place.
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The past is past, the future unformed. There is only the moment, and that is where he prefers to be.
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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. But I was very careful to bury them deeply, deeply in the plaster and paint over them. I didn't want anybody to directly access them, and that's gradually changed for me.
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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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Twitter is the only brand of social media that I have ever taken to at all. I like the feeling of having my perception of the world expanded daily, 24/7, by being able to monitor the reactions of 100-and-some people throughout the world that I personally follow so I have some sense of who they are. There has never really been anything like that before, at least in terms of the digestible 140-character bandwidth that Twitter is based on. I am able to wake up, open Twitter, and sort of glance across the psychic state of the planet.
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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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I watch for emergent technologies and pay attention to what people say they'll be good for, then see what we actually use them for. It never occurred to me that a tiny telephone with a wireless transceiver would do whatever it is that it's done to us.
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It had also been my belief since I started writing fiction that science fiction is never really about the future. When science fiction is old, you can only read it as being pretty much about the moment in which it was written. But it seemed to me that the toolkit that science fiction had given me when I started working had become the toolkit of a kind of literary naturalism that could be applied to an inherently incredible present.
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Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.
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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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Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description.
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Secrets...are the very root of cool.
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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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Movies have gotten dull, the way network television got dull. And television, if we can still even call it that, is still really exciting and riveting and people are totally into it. I am always meeting people who have these favorite shows that they are completely wired too and not only have I never seen it but I don't even know how to find it.
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If someone comes in and says, "What are you doing," if I'm honest, the answer is, "I don't know. But I'm doing THIS, don't know why."
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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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For me, the melancholy of the late XXth Century is walking late at night by the Mont Blanc pen store and seeing these things always strike me as simulacra of luxury items. They seem like fakes.
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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.