William Gibson Quotes - Page 4

Secrets...are the very root of cool.

That's something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: The most interesting applications turn up on a battlefield, or in a gallery.

His smile was the nightmare in my back pocket.(Speaking about Ronald Reagan)

His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass spines.

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

I've become convinced that nostalgia is a fundamentally unhealthy modality. When you see it, it's usually attached to something else that's really, seriously bad. I don't traffic in nostalgia. We're becoming a global culture.

When I come to a new city is I combine: I say, well, it's like Barcelona and Edinburgh, though I can't imagine what that would be. But Toronto, the last few times I've been here, what always comes up is Chicago and West Berlin. It's a big, sprawling city beside a lake, of a certain age and a certain architectural complexity. But the high-end retail core looks more like West Germany than the Magnificent Mile. Yonge Street is like K-Damm. There's an excess of surface marble and bronze: it's Germanic and as pretentious as pretentious can be.

I think I'd probably tell you that it's easier to desire and pursue the attention of tens of millions of total strangers than it is to accept the love and loyalty of the people closest to us.

The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience.

When I began to write fiction that I knew would be published as science fiction, [and] part of what I brought to it was the critical knowledge that science fiction was always about the period in which it was written.

Generation X is dead. It has come to mean anyone aged 13 to 55 years old.

I don't always like writing, but I very much like having written.

I realized that everyone in Western society, in some weird way, believes that they've had the experience of producing feature films.

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.

I'm embarrassed if I think anyone knows exactly what I paid for something, or even where I got it. I want what I'm wearing to feel good on, wear well, and to be extremely functional.

His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol.

Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television.

One of the liberating effects of science fiction when I was a teenager was precisely its ability to tune me into all sorts of strange data and make me realize that I wasn’t as totally isolated in perceiving the world as being monstrous and crazy

I think the large part of the function of the Internet is it is archival. It's unreliable to the extent that word on the street is unreliable. It's no more unreliable than that. You can find the truth on the street if you work at it. I don't think of the Internet or the virtual as being inherently inferior to the so-called real.

I wanted to make room for antiheroes.

A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my own career want list. That label enabled mainstream science fiction to safely assimilate our dissident influence, such as it was. Cyberpunk could then be embraced and given prizes and patted on the head, and genre science fiction could continue unchanged.

Hollis thought he looked like William Burroughs, minus the bohemian substrate (or perhaps the methadone). Like someone who'd be invited quail shooting with the vice-president, though too careful to get himself shot.

Some people dote on contemplating disasters.

"Cyberspace is everting." It's interpenetrating our everyday reality to the point that on-line is our normal waking state.

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.