"The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet."
— William Ford Gibson

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

"The street finds its own uses for things."
— William Ford Gibson

"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 Ford Gibson (Pattern Recognition)

"...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 Ford Gibson (Idoru)

"The deadliest bullshit is odorless, and transparent."
— William Ford 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 Ford Gibson (Neuromancer)

"Stand high long enough and your lightning will come."
— William Ford Gibson

"The present tense made him nervous"
— William Ford Gibson

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

Silver nitrous girls pointed into occult winds of porn and destiny."
— William Ford Gibson

"The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet."
— William Ford 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 Ford Gibson (Idoru)

"The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it."
— William Ford Gibson

"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots."
— William Ford Gibson (Pattern Recognition)

"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 Ford Gibson (Count Zero)

"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 Ford Gibson

"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 Ford 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 Ford Gibson (Spook Country)

"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 Ford Gibson (Neuromancer)

"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 Ford Gibson (Neuromancer)

"His smile was the nightmare in my back pocket.(Speaking about Ronald Reagan)"
— William Ford Gibson

"Time is money, but also money is money."
— William Ford Gibson (Pattern Recognition)

"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 Ford Gibson

"She walked on, comforted by the surf, by the one perpetual moment of beach-time, the now-and-always of it."
— William Ford Gibson

" 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 Ford Gibson (Pattern Recognition)

""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 Ford Gibson (Burning Chrome)

"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 Ford Gibson (Neuromancer)

"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 Ford 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 Ford Gibson

"It was hot, the night we burned Chrome."
— William Ford Gibson (Burning Chrome)

"Damien is a friend.
Their boy-girl Lego doesn't click, he would say."
— William Ford 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 Ford Gibson (Idoru)

"Seated each afternoon in the darkened screening room, Halliday came to recognise the targeted numerals of the Academy leader as sigils preceding the dream state of a film. "
— William Ford Gibson

"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots."
— William Ford Gibson

"And now it's late, close to the wolfing hour of soul-lack. But she knows, lying curled here, behind him, in the darkness of this small room, with the somehow liquid background sounds of Paris, that hers has returned, at least for the meantime, reeled entirely in on its silver thread and warmly socketed."
— William Ford Gibson

"'Well,' Rydell said, trying to pick up his end, 'I was watching this one old movie last night-'

Sublett perked up. 'Which one?'

'Dunno,' Rydell said. 'This guy's in L.A. and he's just met this girl. Then he picks up a pay phone, 'cause it's ringing. Late at night. It's some guy in a missile silo somewhere who knows they've just launched theirs at the Russians. He's trying to phone his dad, or his brother, or something. Says the world's gonna end in short order. Then the guy who answered the phone hears these soldiers come in and shoot the guy. The guy on the phone, I mean.'

Suhlett closed his eyes, scanning his inner trivia-banks. 'Yeah? How's it end?'

'Dunno,' Rydell said. 'I went to sleep.'"
— William Ford Gibson (Virtual Light)

"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 Ford Gibson (Pattern Recognition)

"...I knew he used women as counters in a game, Bobby Quine 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."
— William Ford Gibson (Burning Chrome)

"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 Ford Gibson (Count Zero)

"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 Ford Gibson

"Three in the morning.
Making yourself a cup of coffee in the dark, using a flashlight when you pour the boiling water."
— William Ford Gibson