Top 100 William Gibson Quotes
#1. After she'd called for the car, they waited outside while it drove itself over.
William Gibson
#3. Generation X is dead. It has come to mean anyone aged 13 to 55 years old.
William Gibson
#4. I'm a really good eavesdropper. I listen to what people say and remember all the buzzwords.
William Gibson
#5. True home of a generation of completely uninhibited technophiles. She was talking about those odds and ends of "futuristic" Thirties and Forties architecture you pass daily in American cities without noticing;
William Gibson
#6. So Hosaka's built a regular little neurosurgery and staffed it with three hotshots. Two of them are company men, the third's a Korean who knows black medicine from both ends.
William Gibson
#7. Genuinely ubiquitous computing spreads like warm Vaseline.
William Gibson
#8. Enlightenment is "being," and it grows; it's end is serenity.
William Gibson
#10. Maverick techs who liked earning danger money and had proven they could keep their mouths shut.
William Gibson
#11. The future is here - it just has not been uniformly distributed.
William Gibson
#12. Perched on the edge of Case's worktable like some kind of state of the art gargoyle,
William Gibson
#13. 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.
William Gibson
#14. I was afraid to watch 'Blade Runner' in the theater because I was afraid the movie would be better than what I myself had been able to imagine. In a way, I was right to be afraid, because even the first few minutes were better.
William Gibson
#15. Otherwise, he'd have found the ruin empty, and then, somehow, very quietly and almost naturally, he would have died.
William Gibson
#16. He disliked the narrative aspects of history, particularly that part of it. People were so boringly deformed by it, like Ash, or else, like Lev, scarcely aware of it.
William Gibson
#17. She was sometimes happy, in the sense of being somehow complete, and ready for what another day might bring. And knows she is no longer that, and that while she was, she scarcely knew it.
William Gibson
#18. The prefix cyber is going the way of the prefix electro,
William Gibson
#19. The yellow Lego was brick-shaped again. Pretending innocence.
William Gibson
#20. Drug deficiency. It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke. The Chatsubo was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there for a week and never hear two words in Japanese.
William Gibson
#21. Homo sapiens is about pattern recognition, he says. Both a gift and a trap.
William Gibson
#22. There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.
William Gibson
#23. Annie: Maybe you all do. It's my idea of the original sin.
James: What is?
Annie: Giving up.
William Gibson
#24. Destiny spelled out in a constellation of cheap chrome.
William Gibson
#25. Things were launching themselves from the ornate sunburst spires, glittering leech shapes made of shifting planes of light. There were hundreds of them, rising in a whirl, their movements random as windblown paper down dawn streets. "Glitch systems," the voice said.
William Gibson
#26. He'd been numb a long time, years. All his nights down Ninsei, his nights with Linda, numb in bed and numb at the cold sweating center of every drug deal. But now he'd found this warm thing, this chip of murder. Meat, some part of him said. It's the meat talking, ignore it.
William Gibson
#27. I think with one exception I've never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed.
William Gibson
#28. The big news in biology this week was the announcement that we've stopped evolving, in the biological sense. I'll buy that. Technology has stopped us, and technology will take us on, into a new evolution, one Mr. Bush never dreamed of, and neither, I'm sure, have I.
William Gibson
#29. Bartender's smile widened. His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was
William Gibson
#30. It took a month for the gestalt of drugs and tension he moved through to turn those perpetually startled eyes into wells of reflexive need. He'd watched her personality fragment, calving like an iceberg, splinters drifting away, and finally he'd seen the raw need, the hungry armature of addiction.
William Gibson
#31. We're living in a future that's weirder than anybody except possibly.
William Gibson
#32. I assume that - because you can get degrees in journalism from very reputable universities - I assume that people can be trained to be journalists. I've never been entirely certain that anyone can be trained to be a novelist in the same way.
William Gibson
#33. It was called dub, a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast libraries of digitalized pop; it was worship, Molly said, and a sense of community.
William Gibson
#34. Cyberspace is where you are when you're on the telephone.
William Gibson
#35. I don't begin a novel with a shopping list - the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it.
William Gibson
#36. If the content is sufficiently engrossing, however, you don't need wraparound deep-immersion goggles to shut out the world. You grow your own. You are there. Watching the content you most want to see, you see nothing else.
William Gibson
#37. the mall crowds swaying like wind-blown grass, a field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies of need and gratification
William Gibson
#38. You will come with us. We are at home with situations of legal ambiguity. The treaties under which our arm of the Registry operates grant us a great deal of flexibility. And we create flexibility, in situations where it is required.
William Gibson
#39. 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.
William Gibson
#40. Architectural photography can involve a lot of waiting; the building becomes a kind of sundial, while you wait for a shadow to crawl away from a detail you want, or for the mass and balance of the structure to reveal itself in a certain way.
William Gibson
#41. The past is past, the future unformed. There is only the moment, and that is where he prefers to be.
William Gibson
#42. Because people who couldn't imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn't need to imagine, because they already were.
William Gibson
#43. Know what 'collateral damage' means?" "People get hurt because they happen to be near something that somebody needs to happen?
William Gibson
#44. I can see television much more easily than I can see features, because the economy and politics of making big, big features seems to me to be narrowing even from what it was.
William Gibson
#45. Netherton was watching the intricate texture of her bustier, which resembled a microminiature model of some Victorian cast-iron station roof, its countless tiny panes filmed as by the coal smoke of fingerling locomotives, yet flexing as she breathed and spoke.
William Gibson
#46. 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.
William Gibson
#47. And then she hears the sound of a helicopter, from somewhere behind her and, turning, sees the long white beam of light sweeping the dead ground as it comes, like a lighthouse gone mad from loneliness, and searching that barren ground as foolishly, as randomly, as any grieving heart ever has.
William Gibson
#48. Media'?" "I guess so." "It was an artifact of relatively low connectivity.
William Gibson
#49. stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it. The antique arm whined as he reached for
William Gibson
#50. Let us go somewhere where we can do some genuine, blackguard, poverty-stricken drinking, with no false gingerbread glitter thrown over everything!
William Gibson
#51. Now Sally plunged her abruptly into the full strangeness of this place, with its rot and randomness rooting towers taller than any in Tokyo, corporate obelisks that pierced the sooty lacework of overlapping domes.
William Gibson
#52. Know what's worse than imaginary, Leon?"
"What?"
"Half-imaginary.
William Gibson
#53. A trio of young office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on their wrists, wet pink glittering under the harsh lighting.
William Gibson
#54. '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.
William Gibson
#55. The Internet is part of this ongoing, species-long project we've been working on since we climbed down out of the trees in the savanna. We've been working on it without really knowing it.
William Gibson
#56. That's something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: The most interesting applications turn up on a battlefield, or in a gallery.
William Gibson
#57. Case gradually became aware of the music that pulsed constantly through the cluster. It was called dub, a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast libraries of digitalized pop;
William Gibson
#58. The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly and at great length. If not for our excessive vanity and our over-active imaginations, novelists might be unusually difficult to deceive.
William Gibson
#59. They seem to have accepted that she's gone." "I don't see how they could be sure she is. But I wish we'd known. Could've brought some flowers." "Daedra never suggested this. It seems to be a surprise." "A surprise funeral? You do that, here?" "A first, for me.
William Gibson
#60. Fiction is an illusion wrought with many small, conventionally symbolic marks, triggering visions in the minds of others
William Gibson
#61. Then the snake and the scorpion were gone, and he held a milky plastic syringe in his left hand. " 'If God made anything better, he kept it for himself.' You know the expression, Case?
William Gibson
#62. When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.
William Gibson
#63. He woke with the impression of light fading, but the room was dark. Afterimages, retinal flares. The sky outside hinted at the start of a recorded dawn. There were no voices now, only the rush of water, far down the face of the Intercontinental. In
William Gibson
#64. His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol.
William Gibson
#65. What flavor, though? Chinese? Indian? I'm not even convinced it's offshore. Maybe it starts here, goes out, comes back in." "I wouldn't know about that. Company's Colombian." "Columbia S.C., for all I know,
William Gibson
#66. Not hungry,' Case managed. His brain was deep-fried. No, he decided, it had been thrown into hot fat and left there, and the fat had cooled, a thick dull grease congealing on the wrinkled lobes, shot through with greenish-purple flashes of pain. 'You
William Gibson
#67. Science fiction writers aren't fortune tellers. Fortune tellers are fakes.
William Gibson
#68. In the early '80s, I happened to find myself in the vicinity of people who would work for Microsoft five years later.
William Gibson
#69. History had its fascinations, but could be burdensome.
William Gibson
#72. I'm interested in how people all over the world array themselves and go forth in the morning to do whatever they have to do to make a living.
William Gibson
#73. So now, in her day, he said, they were headed into androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad shit, like she sort of already knew, figured everybody did, except for people who still said it wasn't happening, and those people were mostly expecting the Second Coming, anyway.
William Gibson
#74. When I start writing a novel, I have no sense of direction, no idea, really nothing.
William Gibson
#75. My dream scenario would be that you could go into a bookshop, examine copies of every book in print that they're able to offer, then for a fee have them produce in a minute or two a beautiful finished copy in a dust jacket that you would pay for and take home.
William Gibson
#76. I read a great deal of science fiction with consummate pleasure between, say, the ages of 12 and 16. Then I got away from it. In my mid- to late 20s, I started trying to write it.
William Gibson
#77. I knew he used women as counters in a game, Bobby Quine versus time and the night of cities. And Rikki had turned up just when he needed something to get him going, something to aim for. So he'd set her up as a symbol for everything he wanted and couldn't have, everything he'd had and couldn't keep.
William Gibson
#78. If you make something, it's an artifact. It's something that somebody or some corporate entity has caused to come into being. A great many human beings have thought about each of the artifacts that surround us. Different degrees of intelligence and attention have been brought to bear on anything.
William Gibson
#79. It's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information.
William Gibson
#80. It seemed that it was changing subtly, cooking itself down under the pressure of time, silent invisible flakes settling to form a mulch, a crystalline essence of discarded technology, flowering secretly in the Sprawl's waste places.
William Gibson
#83. Are you - are you sad?"
- No.
"But your - your songs are sad."
- My songs are of time and distance. The sadness is in you. Watch my arms. There is only the dance. These things you treasure are shells.
William Gibson
#84. The future is there ... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.
William Gibson
#85. He saw Case and smiled, his teeth a webwork of East European steel and brown decay.
William Gibson
#87. He'd lived for so long on a constant edge of anxiety that he'd almost forgotten what real fear was.
William Gibson
#88. The U.S. hundred is the international currency of bad shit, Hollis, and by the same token the number one target of counterfeiters.
William Gibson
#89. To call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed that, once, but now it is real in another way. You know that, Case. Your business is to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names the owners seek to conceal. True names . . .
William Gibson
#90. 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.
William Gibson
#91. You need to learn to overcome your very natural and appropriate revulsion for your own work
William Gibson
#93. And Bobby was working on a new theory of personal deportment; he didn't quite have the whole thing yet, but part of it involved the idea that people who were genuinely dangerous might not need to exhibit the fact at all, and that the ability to conceal a threat made them even more dangerous.
William Gibson
#94. That's one of my favorite things about Twitter: You can tweak your feed into a fabulous novelty engine. That's only one thing you can do with it, but it's one of the things I find most entertaining about it.
William Gibson
#95. She is increasingly of the opinion that worrying about problems doesn't help solve them, but she hasn't really found an alternative yet. Surely you can't just leave them there.
William Gibson
#96. He'd missed the first wasp, when it built its paperfine gray house on the blistered paint of the windowframe, but soon the nest was a fist-sized lump of fiber, insects hurtling out to hunt the alley below like miniature copters buzzing the rotting contents of the dumpsters.
William Gibson
#97. His smile was the nightmare in my back pocket.(Speaking about Ronald Reagan)
William Gibson
#99. I have this prejudice that trilogies are long, three-volume novels.
William Gibson
#100. The box was nearly finished now, she thought, although it moved so quickly, in the padded claws, that it was difficult to see ... Abruptly, it floated free, tumbling end over end, and she sprang for it instinctively, caught it, and went tumbling past the flashing arms, her treasure in her arms.
William Gibson
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