William Gibson Quotes

100 Sourced Quotes

The NET is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it.

William Gibson
The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.

William Gibson
The straight world didn't end. The straight world and the other world had bled into one another and produced the world that we live in today.

William Gibson
Stim was a medium she ordinarily avoided, something in her personality conflicting with the required degree of passivity.

William Gibson
The old futures have a way of hanging around... I think now that everyone sort of knows that the real future is going to be cluttered with all the same junk we have today, except it will be old and beat up and there will be more of it.

William Gibson
She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.

William Gibson
It will bring about the extinction of the nation-state as we know it... I think it will be as big a deal as the creation of cities.

William Gibson
I think that the computer as some sort of discrete object that one owns and is very, very aware of... will become a very quaint and antique concept.

William Gibson
She walked on, comforted by the surf, by the one perpetual moment of beach-time, the now-and-always of it.

William Gibson
It's a world where there aren't families. It's the world of a young person going out into the wilderness, cities, and sort of in a way creating a family. You know, it's kind of like... it's not that it's a "goth book," but it's kind of rather the same stuff that makes kids be goths.

William Gibson
Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places that had once belonged to cigarettes now belonged to phones.

William Gibson
Acceptance. Acceptance of the impermanence of being. And acceptance of the imperfect nature of being, or possibly the perfect nature of being, depending on how one looks at it. Acceptance that this is not a rehearsal. That this is it.

William Gibson
Hell of a world we live in, huh?... But it could be worse, huh? That's right, I said, or even worse, it could be perfect.

William Gibson
The man steps past them, his cheeks seamed vertically in deep parentheses, as though it has been his habit frequently to smile. They do not see him smile.
The Tao, he reminds himself, is older than God.

William Gibson
Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.

William Gibson
My first impulse, when presented with any spanking-new piece of computer hardware, is to imagine how it will look in ten years' time, gathering dust under a card table in a thrift shop.

William Gibson
The old man reminded Tito of those ghost-signs, fading high on the windowless sides of blackened buildings, spelling out the names of products made meaningless by time.

William Gibson
Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television.

William Gibson
Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway.

William Gibson
Viewing them induced a mild but not unpleasant vertigo, one of the rare times she was able to directly grasp the fact of her fame.

William Gibson
"Dix," Case said, "I wanna have a look at an AI in Berne. Can you think of any reason not to?"
"Not unless you got a morbid fear of death, no."

William Gibson
They sat around accessing media all day and talking about it, and nothing ever seemed to get done.

William Gibson
He came in steep, fueled by self-loathing. When the Kuang program met the first of the defenders, scattering the leaves of light, he felt the shark thing lose a degree of substantiality, the fabric of information loosening. And then — old alchemy of the brain and its vast pharmacy — his hate flowed into his hands. In the instant before he drove Kuang's sting through the base of the first tower, he attained a level of proficiency exceeding anything he'd known or imagined. Beyond ego, beyond personality, beyond awareness, he moved, Kuang moving with him, evading his attackers with an ancient dance, Hideo's dance, grace of the mind-body interface granted him, in that second, by the clarity and singleness of his wish to die.

William Gibson
Another example — maybe a better one, in a way — was when it was confirmed that Michael Jackson was going to marry Elvis Presley's daughter. [loud, game-show buzzer noise] A good friend of mine in the States faxed me, and he simply … he said, "This makes your job more difficult." And I knew exactly, I knew exactly what he meant. 'Cos something … a scenario that seemed to belong to the universe of the late Terry Southern, was suddenly, suddenly real. It's that truth-is-stranger-than-fiction factor keeps getting jacked up on us on a fairly regular, maybe even exponential, basis. I think that's something peculiar to our time. I don't think our grandparents had to live with that.

William Gibson
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.

William Gibson
All any drug amounts to is tweaking the incoming data. You have to be incredibly self-centered or pathetic to be satisfied with simply tweaking the incoming data.

William Gibson
He found work.
He found a girl who called herself Michael.

William Gibson
Organized religion, he saw, back in the day, had been purely a signal-to-noise proposition, at once the medium and the message, a one-channel universe. For Europe, that channel was Christian, and broadcasting from Rome, but nothing could be broadcast faster than a man could travel on horseback. There was a hierarchy in place, and a highly organized methodology of top-down signal dissemination, but the time lag enforced by tech-lack imposed a near-disastrous ratio, the noise of heresy constantly threatening to overwhelm the signal.

William Gibson
There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt. A point at which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is innately media-related.

William Gibson
As broker, I'm usually very careful as to sources.
You buy only from those who steal the best. Got it.

William Gibson