William Gibson Quotes

100 Sourced Quotes

The written word still enjoyed a certain prestige here. It was a sluggish country.

William Gibson
Honey, Jammer said, you'll learn. Some things you teach yourself to remember to forget.

William Gibson
Somewhere, very close, the laugh that wasn't laughter.
He never saw Molly again.

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

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

William Gibson
The Gothick girl regarded Bobby with mild interest but no flash of human recognition whatever, as though she were seeing an ad for a product she'd heard of but had no intention of buying.

William Gibson
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.

William Gibson
Damien is a friend. Their boy-girl Lego doesn't click, he would say.

William Gibson
They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin. Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours. The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective. For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall.

William Gibson
All I knew about the word "cyberspace" when I coined it, was that it seemed like an effective buzzword. It seemed evocative and essentially meaningless. It was suggestive of something, but had no real semantic meaning, even for me, as I saw it emerge on the page.

William Gibson
The stick-on holograms had actually had some effect on Bobby, because religion was now something he felt he'd considered and put aside. Basically, the way he figured it, there were just some people around who needed that shit, and he guessed there always had been, but he wasn't one of them, so he didn't.

William Gibson
A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he'd cut in Night City, and he'd still see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void… The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there.

William Gibson
When did you ever go to a drug dealer, and the drug dealer said, "you know, you should come back tomorrow, this is not very pure." It doesn't happen.

William Gibson
Don' 'stand you, mon, but we mus' move by Jah Love, each one

William Gibson
Somewhere, deep within her, surfaces a tiny clockwork submarine. There are times when you can only take the next step. And then another.

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

William Gibson
Consequently, when I got to Toronto, much to my chagrin, I really, really couldn't handle hanging out with the American draft dodgers. There was too much clinical depression. Too much suicide. Too much hardcore substance abuse. They were a traumatized lot, those boys. And I just felt frivolous.

William Gibson
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.

William Gibson
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from 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...

William Gibson
We monitor many frequencies. We listen always. Came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. It played us a mighty dub.

William Gibson
Drugs were absolutely central to that experience, but they weren't essential. I only know that in retrospect. At the time I'm sure I would have said that they were.

William Gibson
I think of religions as franchise operations. Like chicken franchise operations. But that doesn't mean there's no chicken, right?

William Gibson
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.

William Gibson
You are exhibiting symptoms of urban singles angst. There are cures for this. Drink up.

William Gibson
A nation, he heard himself say, consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual's morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation's laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn't a nation.

William Gibson
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
I think of Neuromancer as being, in a good sense, an adolescent book. It's a young man's book. It was written very young-man's-book. It was written by a man who was not very young, when he wrote it, but who was sufficiently immature.

William Gibson