William Gibson > Quotes

“The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet.”
― William Gibson

“Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounding yourself with assholes.”
― William Gibson

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

“The street finds its own uses for things.”
― William Gibson

“The deadliest bullshit is odorless, and transparent.”
― 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, Idoru

“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, Neuromancer

“We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. 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, Pattern Recognition

“One of the liberating effects of science fiction when I was a teenager was precisely its ability to tune me into all sorts of strange data and make me realize that I wasn’t as totally isolated in perceiving the world as being monstrous and crazy”
― William Gibson

“Stand high long enough and your lightning will come.”
― 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, Count Zero

“The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it.”
― William Gibson

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

“The present tense made him nervous.”
― William Gibson

“All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he'd cut in Night City, and still he'd see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void...”
― William Gibson, Neuromancer

“He took a duck in the face at 250 knots.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“Time is money, but also money is money.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“Friday, August 04, 2006
MONUMENT
posted 8:31 AM

Silver nitrous girls pointed into occult winds of porn and destiny.”
― William Gibson

“Secrets...are the very root of cool.”
― William Gibson, Spook Country

“She walked on, comforted by the surf, by the one perpetual moment of beach-time, the now-and-always of it.”
― 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, Zero History

“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, Pattern Recognition

“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, Idoru

“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, Neuromancer

“To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing.”
― William Gibson

“We see in order to move; we move in order to see.”
― William Gibson

“[Slitscan's audience] is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.”
― William Gibson, Idoru

“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, Burning Chrome

“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, Pattern Recognition

“His smile was the nightmare in my back pocket.(Speaking about Ronald Reagan)”
― William Gibson

“Hollis thought he looked like William Burroughs, minus the bohemian substrate (or perhaps the methadone). Like someone who'd be invited quail shooting with the vice-president, though too careful to get himself shot.”
― William Gibson, Spook Country

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

“Home.

Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis.

Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta...”
― William Gibson

“It was hot, the night we burned Chrome.”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

“You know what your trouble is? You're the kind who
always reads the handbook. Anything people build,
any kind of technology, it's going to have some specific
purpose. It's for doing something that somebody already
understands. But if it's new technology, it'll open
areas nobody's ever thought of before. You read the manual,
man, and you won't play around with it, not the same way.
And you get all funny when somebody else uses it to do
something you never thought of.”
― 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, Pattern Recognition

“It is a way now, approximately, of being at home. The forum has become one of the most consistent places of her life, like a familiar cafe that exists someone outside geography and beyond time zones.
There are perhaps twenty regular posters on F:F:F:, and some muchlarger and uncounted number of lurkers. And right now there are three people in Chat. But there's no way of knowing exactly who until you are in there, and the chat room she finds not so comforting. It's strange even with friends, like sitting in a pitch-dark cellar conversing with people at a distance of about fifteen feet. the hectic speed, and the brevity of the lines in the thread, plus the feeling that everyone is talking at once, at counmter-purposes, deter her.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“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, Spook Country

“The faces he woke up with in the worlds hotels were like God's own hood ornaments. Women's sleeping faces, identical and alone, naked, aimed straight out to the void.”
― William Gibson

“Three in the morning.
Making yourself a cup of coffee in the dark, using a flashlight when you pour the boiling water.”
― 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, Pattern Recognition

“Farber says (in my recollection, anyway) the European (or classical) art, including film, is culturally assumed to be a monumental slab. It's about that slab, and how it's been shaped, or what's been carved on it. In "termite art" though, your slab has been wormholed countless times, and its meaning is really taking place in the resulting interstices. The actual art of the piece, in other words, and your enjoyment of it, is taking place in the cracks, and the shape of the slab is coincidental and ultimately meaningless.”
― William Gibson

“And don't forget to water the fuckin' goldfish.”
― 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, Spook Country

“When I began to write fiction that I knew would be published as science fiction, [and] part of what I brought to it was the critical knowledge that science fiction was always about the period in which it was written.”
― 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

“What happened to your arm?" she asked me one night in the Gentleman Loser, the three of us drinking at a small table in a corner.

Hang-gliding," I said, "accident."

Hang-gliding over a wheatfield," said Bobby, "place called Kiev. Our Jack's just hanging there in the dark, under a Nightwing parafoil, with fifty kilos of radar jammed between his legs, and some Russian asshole accidentally burns his arm off with a laser."

I don't remember how I changed the subject, but I did.

I was still telling myself that it wasn't Rikki who getting to me, but what Bobby was doing with her. I'd known him for a long time, since the end of the war, and I knew he used women as counters in a game, Bobby Quine versus fortune, versus time and the night of cities. And Rikki had turned up just when he needed something to get him going, something to aim for. So he'd set her up as a symbol for everything he wanted and couldn't have, everything he'd had and couldn't keep.

I didn't like having to listen to him tell me how much he loved her, and knowing he believed it only made it worse. He was a past master at the hard fall and the rapid recovery, and I'd seen it happen a dozen times before. He might as well have had next printed across his sunglasses in green Day-Glo capitals, ready to flash out at the first interesting face that flowed past the tables in the Gentleman Loser.

I knew what he did to them. He turned them into emblems, sigils on the map of his hustler' s life, navigation beacons he could follow through a sea of bars and neon. What else did he have to steer by? He didn't love money, in and of itself , not enough to follow its lights. He wouldn't work for power over other people; he hated the responsibility it brings. He had some basic pride in his skill, but that was never enough to keep him pushing.

So he made do with women.

When Rikki showed up, he needed one in the worst way. He was fading fast, and smart money was already whispering that the edge was off his game. He needed that one big score, and soon, because he didn't know any other kind of life, and all his clocks were set for hustler's time, calibrated in risk and adrenaline and that supernal dawn calm that comes when every move's proved right and a sweet lump of someone else's credit clicks into your own account.”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

“[...] the street finds its own uses for things.”
― William Gibson, Burning Chrome

“His nostrils were permanently flared, as though he sniffed invisible winds of art and commerce.”
― William Gibson, Count Zero

“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.”
― William Gibson