William Gibson Quotes - Page 9

Friday, August 04, 2006 MONUMENT posted 8:31 AM Silver nitrous girls pointed into occult winds of porn and destiny.

Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky.

It doesn't matter how fast your modem is if you're being shelled by ethnic separatists.

The future's here already. It's just unevenly distributed.

Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description.

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.

If there's a movie of Neuromancer, what I really want the special effects guys to do is make you see, from Case's point of view, the little acid giggies: the little lines and trails coming off of things.

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.

To some extent I'm guilty of wishful thinking. The absence of the interstitial I find unbearable.

The construct of William Gibson the Writer is coming down, and become more open. It's more of a Glasnost - Transparency! Transparency is what it is.

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."

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.

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.

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.

All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he'd cut in Night City, and still he'd see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void.

I was once really close to sitting down and having a conversation with a shadowy young woman who is reputed have become a millionaire by investing in Beanie Babies. She was someone that a couple people claimed to know, she seemed to exist, but she remained shadowy.

What strikes me about Toronto is that Toronto's great misfortune was to have too much money in the late 70s and early 80s, and consequently, it built in the style of those periods, which is hideous.

A lot of the buildings [in Toronto] around Yonge and Bloor is the architectural equivalent of Kipper Ties and 8" collar points. It's ghastly and no amount of street-level retail glitz can lift it.

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.

Somehow I think that if Toronto had been forced to wait a decade [from 80th], it would be a better looking city.

Every shop in every High Street in Europe is filled with basically the same stuff. There's a street in every city of the world that has a Gap and Benneton's, and the upscale versions of those.

I think that the collectible ephemera craze/awareness is probably driven by a reverse market, rebounding off the sense of everything being mass-produced. It's the last step you take in trying to find something unique.

I have this prejudice that trilogies are long, three-volume novels.

If I meet someone and discover that they're an absolute, very earnest nationalist, it's unlikely that I'm going to get much closer to them. I don't understand them. It doesn't matter where they're from, I just don't get it. I'm a multi-national kind of guy.

Television has - particularly at the HBO level in the United States - become a completely new genre. Something like Deadwood or The Wire is a whole new thing - there was no equivalent to that medium before. It's like a new way of telling stories.