William Gibson Quotes

Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.

The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet.

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination.

People who feel safer with a gun than with guaranteed medical insurance don't yet have a fully adult concept of scary.

When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.

The deadliest bullshit is odorless, and transparent.

The future is there... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.

I think that technologies are morally neutral until we apply them. It's only when we use them for good or for evil that they become good or evil.

The future is not Google-able.

Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.

I do not think an enormous permanent underclass is a very good thing to have if you're attempting to operate something that at least pretends sometimes to be a democracy.

We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition.

Stand high long enough and your lightning will come.

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 is colonising what we used to think of as the real world. I think that our grandchildren will probably regard the distinction we make between what we call the real world and what they think of as simply the world as the quaintest and most incomprehensible thing about us.

A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.

My problem is that all things are increasingly interesting to me

The present tense made him nervous.

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.

Time is money, but also money is money.

A book exists at the intersection of the author's subconscious and the reader's response.

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.

The street finds its own uses for things.