William Gibson Quotes

100 Sourced Quotes

Your saving grace, Danielle, is that you make the rest of your kind look vaguely human.

William Gibson
Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting change in the world outside. Neuromancer was personality. Neuromancer was immortality. Marie-France must have built something into Wintermute, the compulsion that had driven the thing to free itself, to unite with Neuromancer.

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

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

William Gibson
In Heathrow a vast chunk of memory detached itself from a blank bowl of airport sky and fell on him. He vomited into a blue plastic container without breaking stride. When he arrived at the counter at the end of corridor, he changed his ticket.

William Gibson
In 1977, facing first-time parenthood and an absolute lack of enthusiasm for anything like "career," I found myself dusting off my twelve-year-old's interest in science fiction. Simultaneously, weird noises were being heard from New York and London. I took Punk to be the detonation of some slow-fused projectile buried deep in society's flank a decade earlier, and I took it to be, somehow, a sign. And I began, then, to write.
And have been, ever since.

William Gibson
The lane to the land of the dead. Where you are, my friend. Marie-France, my lady, she prepared this road, but her lord choked her off before I could read the book of her days. Neuro from the nerves, the silver paths. Romancer. Necromancer. I call up the dead. But no, my friend," and the boy did a little dance, brown feet printing the sand, "I am the dead, and their land." He laughed. A gull cried, "Stay. If your woman is a ghost, she doesn't know it. Neither will you."

William Gibson
Found this picture of Angie laughing in a restaurant with some other people, everybody pretty but beyond that it was like they had this glow, not really in the photograph but it was there anyway, something you feel. Look, she said to Lanette, showing her the picture, they got this glow.
It's called money, Lanette said.

William Gibson
You were hurt, Kumiko said, looking at the scar.
Sally looked down. Yeah.
Why don't you have it removed?
Sometimes it's good to remember.
Being hurt?
Being stupid.

William Gibson
Rain woke him, a slow drizzle, his feet tangled in coils of discarded fiberoptics. The arcade's sea of sound washed over him, receded, returned. Rolling over, he sat up and held his head.

William Gibson
It's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information.

William Gibson
That's interesting in itself, because it shows you how adept they were at obscurity. They used their money to keep themselves out of the news.

William Gibson
As I luxuriate in the discovery that I am no special sponge for sorrow, but merely another fallible animal in this stone maze of a city, I come simultaneously to see that I am the focus of some vast device fueled by an obscure desire.

William Gibson
The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length. If not for our excessive vanity and our over-active imaginations, novelists might be unusually difficult to deceive.

William Gibson
"Hate," Case said. "Who do I hate? You tell me." "Who do you love?" the Finn's voice asked.

William Gibson
His nostrils were permanently flared, as though he sniffed invisible winds of art and commerce.

William Gibson
We no longer grow the full beef of bohemia, It's all veal now.

William Gibson
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.

William Gibson
The cutting of Sense/Net's ice took a total of nine days. "I said a week," Armitage said, unable to conceal his satisfaction when Case showed him his plan for the run. "You took your own good time." "Balls," Case said, smiling at the screen. "That's good work, Armitage." "Yes," Armitage admitted, "but don't let it go to your head. Compared to what you'll eventually be up against, this is an arcade toy."

William Gibson
Have you ever considered the relationship of clinical paranoia to the phenomenon of religious conversion?

William Gibson
I didn't imagine that art girls in the Midwest would be flashing their tits in cyberspace... but I'm glad that they're doing it.

William Gibson
It had much more to do with my wanting to be with hippy girls and have lots of hashish than it did with my sympathy for the plight of the North Vietnamese people under US imperialism. Much more, much more to do with hippy girls and hashish.

William Gibson
"Hey," he'd said, "it's me. Case."
The old eyes regarding him out of their dark webs of wrinkled flesh.
"Ah," Ratz had said, at last, "the artiste."
The bartender shrugged. "I came back."
The man shook his massive, stubbled head. "Night City is not a place one returns to, artiste," he said, swabbing the bar in front of Case with a filthy cloth, the pink manipulator whining.

William Gibson
You needed a new pancreas. The one we bought for you frees you from a dangerous dependency. Thanks, but I was enjoying that dependency.

William Gibson
Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you'd break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks.

William Gibson
Laney had recently noticed that the only people who had titles that clearly described their jobs had jobs he wouldn't have wanted.

William Gibson
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

William Gibson
You have no idea, said Ralfi, suddenly sounding very tired, the depths of shit you have just gotten yourself into.

William Gibson
The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-circuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone. Sandstorms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding... The anger was expanding, relentless, exponential, riding out behind the betaphenethylamine rush like a carrier wave, a seismic fluid, rich and corrosive.

William Gibson
I'd buy him a drink, but I don't know if I'd loan him any money.

William Gibson