William Gibson Quotes

100 Sourced Quotes

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

William Gibson
If you're fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don't know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one's own culture.

William Gibson
He'd grown up in white Jersey stringtowns where nobody knew shit about anything and hated anybody who did.

William Gibson
The past is past, the future unformed. There is only the moment, and that is where he prefers to be.

William Gibson
They'd left the place littered with the abstract white forms of the foam packing units, with crumpled plastic film and hundreds of tiny foam beads. The Ono-Sendai; next year's most expensive Hosaka computer; a Sony monitor; a dozen disks of corporate-grade ice; a Braun coffee maker.

William Gibson
The future is there," Cayce hears herself say, "looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.

William Gibson
Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking.

William Gibson
Loss is not without its curious advantages for the artist. Major traumatic breaks are pretty common in the biographies of artists I respect.

William Gibson
So it's entirely fair to say, and I've said it before, that the way Neuromancer-the-novel "looks" was influenced in large part by some of the artwork I saw in 'Heavy Metal'. I assume that this must also be true of John Carpenter's 'Escape from New York', Ridley Scott's 'Blade Runner'", and all other artefacts of the style sometimes dubbed 'cyberpunk'. Those French guys, they got their end in early.

William Gibson
Addictions... started out like magical pets, pocket monsters. They did extraordinary tricks, showed you things you hadn't seen, were fun. But came, through some gradual dire alchemy, to make decisions for you. Eventually, they were making your most crucial life-decisions. And they were [...] less intelligent than goldfish.

William Gibson