William Gibson > Quotes

“The future is there... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.

The Economist, December 4, 2003”
― William Gibson

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

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

“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

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

“Time moves in one direction, memory another. We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.”
― William Gibson, Distrust That Particular Flavor

“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

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

“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

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

“Stand high long enough and your lightning will come.”
― William Gibson

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

“When the past is always with you, it may as well be present; and if it is present, it will be future as well.”
― William Gibson, Neuromancer

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

“Things aren't different. Things are things.”
― William Gibson, Neuromancer

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

“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

“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

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

“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

“She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“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

“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

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

“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

“We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self.”
― William Gibson, Neuromancer

“Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Dar-
winism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb
permanently on the fast-forward button.”
― William Gibson, Neuromancer