William Gibson Quotes

100 Sourced Quotes

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
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