68 William Ford Gibson Quotes

William Ford Gibson quotes

1. The NET is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it.

2. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

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

4. They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin. Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours.The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective. For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall.

5. 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.

6. '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.

7. 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.'

8. A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he'd cut in Night City, and he'd still see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void.... The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there.

9. 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...

10. Don' 'stand you, mon, but we mus' move by Jah Love, each one

11. 'Hate,' Case said. 'Who do I hate? You tell me.' 'Who do you love?' the Finn's voice asked.

12. 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.

13. He came in steep, fueled by self-loathing. When the Kuang program met the first of the defenders, scattering the leaves of light, he felt the shark thing lose a degree of substantiality, the fabric of information loosening. And then - old alchemy of the brain and its vast pharmacy - his hate flowed into his hands. In the instant before he drove Kuang's sting through the base of the first tower, he attained a level of proficiency exceeding anything he'd known or imagined. Beyond ego, beyond personality, beyond awareness, he moved, Kuang moving with him, evading his attackers with an ancient dance, Hideo's dance, grace of the mind-body interface granted him, in that second, by the clarity and singleness of his wish to die.

14. CASE: 'I wanna have a look at an AI in Berne. Can you think of any reason not to?' DIXIE FLATLINE: `Not unless you got a morbid fear of death, no.'

15. Because he [=Turner] had a good agent, he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway.

16. In Heathrow a vast chunk of memory detached itself from a blank bowl of airport sky and fell on him. He vomited into a blue plastic container without breaking stride. When he arrived at the counter at the end of corridor, he changed his ticket.

17. 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.

18. That truth-is-stranger-than-fiction factor keeps getting jacked up on us on a fairly regular, maybe even exponential, basis. I think that's something peculiar to our time. I don't think our grandparents had to live with that.

19. I'd buy him a drink, but I don't know if I'd loan him any money.

20. I think of Neuromancer as being, in a good sense, an adolescent book. It's a young man's book. It was written very young-man's-book. It was written by a man who was not very young, when he wrote it, but who was sufficiently immature.

21. It's a world where there aren't families. It's the world of a young person going out into the wilderness, cities, and sort of in a way creating a family. You know, it's kind of like... it's not that it's a 'goth book,' but it's kind of rather the same stuff that makes kids be goths.

22. 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.

23. Consequently, when I got to Toronto, much to my chagrin, I really, really couldn't handle hanging out with the American draft dodgers. There was too much clinical depression. Too much suicide. Too much hardcore substance abuse. They were a traumatized lot, those boys. And I just felt frivolous.

24. The straight world didn't end. The straight world and the other world had bled into one another and produced the world that we live in today.

25. Drugs were absolutely central to that experience, but they weren't essential. I only know that in retrospect. At the time I'm sure I would have said that they were.

26. All any drug amounts to is tweaking the incoming data. You have to be incredibly self-centered or pathetic to be satisfied with simply tweaking the incoming data.

27. When did you ever go to a drug dealer, and the drug dealer said, 'you know, you should come back tomorrow, this is not very pure.' It doesn't happen.

28. Acceptance. Acceptance of the impermanence of being. And acceptance of the imperfect nature of being, or possibly the perfect nature of being, depending on how one looks at it. Acceptance that this is not a rehearsal. That this is it.

29. I think of religions as franchise operations. Like chicken franchise operations. But that doesn't mean there's no chicken, right?

30. Seated each afternoon in the darkened screening room, Halliday came to recognise the targetted numerals of the Academy leader as sigils preceding the dream state of a film.

31. I became so frustrated with my inability to physically move the characters through the imaginary narrative space, that I actually developed an early form of imaginary VR technology that sort of covered my ass... all they had to do was switch tapes and be in a different place, and I was spared the embarrassment of demonstrating that I didn't know how to get them up and down the stairs.

32. All I knew about the word 'cyberspace' when I coined it, was that it seemed like an effective buzzword. It seemed evocative and essentially meaningless. It was suggestive of something, but had no real semantic meaning, even for me, as I saw it emerge on the page.

33. It will bring about the extinction of the nation-state as we know it... I think it will be as big a deal as the creation of cities.

34. 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.

35. On the most basic level, computers in my books are simply a metaphor for human memory: I'm interested in the hows and whys of memory, the ways it defines who and what we are, in how easily memory is subject to revision. When I was writing Neuromancer, it was wonderful to be able to tie a lot of these interests into the computer metaphor. It wasn't until I could finally afford a computer of my own that I found out there's a drive mechanism inside- this little thing that spins around. I'd been expecting an exotic crystalline thing, a cyberspace deck or something, and what I got was a little piece of a Victorian engine that made noises like a scratchy old record player. That noise took away some of the mystique for me; it made computers less sexy. My ignorance had allowed me to romanticize them.

36. The future is not google-able.

37. There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt. A point at which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is innately media-related.

38. The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed.

1. There are bits of the literal future right here, right now, if you know how to look for them.

2. For me, the melancholy of the late XXth Century is walking late at night by the Mont Blanc pen store and seeing these things always strike me as simulacra of luxury items. They seem like fakes.

3. When I start writing a new imaginary future, I have no idea what it is. The characters arrive first. They help me figure out where they are living and I get to fill in the gaps with that and where we are. So when I get to the end of the process of composition, if I feel that I have really done my job, I have no idea what I've got - and I then spend essentially the rest of my life figuring out what it might mean.

4. 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.

5. The experience of celebrity is gradually being democratized.

6. I don't generate a storyline and then fill it out in the course of writing. The story actually generates in the course of the writing. It's one of the reasons I've never been comfortable doing screenplays, because in order to get the contract for the screenplay, you have to sit down and tell them what's going to happen.

7. [When] Johnny Mnemonic was coming out and I realized that all the kids that worked in 7-11 knew more - or thought they knew more - about feature film production than I did. And that was from reading Premiere, that was from this change that came from magazines that treat their readers as players. Magazines that purport to sell you the inside experience.

8. The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience.

9. I'm interested in people who become culturally fluent. And when I meet young people I'm often amazed they don't quite seem to have a sense of where they're from. They're like the citizens of the airport.

10. I would like to design what people generally call streetwear. I'd like to dress skateboarders, or whatever the older equivalent of skateboarders are. I pay more attention to that stuff than anyone would ever imagine because I'm watching what the designers do.

11. 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.

12. The thing that 'Neuromancer' predicts as being actually like the Internet isn't actually like the Internet at all!

13. I guess Twitter is the first thing that has been attractive to me as social media. I never felt the least draw to Facebook or MySpace. I've been involved anonymously in some tiny listservs, mainly in my ceaseless quest for random novelty, and sometimes while doing something that more closely resembles research.

14. I'm not a computer guy. I'm like an anthropologist. I'm fascinated with people's obsessions. I've learned to wear them.

15. To the very limited extent that I have a political consciousness, to some extent I'm a lazy, apolitical sort of guy that just flits around.

16. I'm interested in how people all over the world array themselves and go forth in the morning to do whatever they have to do to make a living.

17. Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description.

18. I have friends who go [Tokyo] frequently on business, and it sounds interesting. I've heard that they have for the first time serious drug problems.

19. You must learn to overcome your very natural and appropriate revulsion for your own work.

20. You could have sex relatively comfortably on a platform of books, but not on a platform of PDA.s. Hardcover books. Paperbacks might start sliding around. Though I.d still prefer paperbacks to a pile of PDA.s.

21. A lot of the buildings [in Toronto] around Yonge and Bloor is the architectural equivalent of Kipper Ties and 8" collar points. It's ghastly and no amount of street-level retail glitz can lift it.

22. The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.

23. Laney had recently noticed that the only people who had titles that clearly described their jobs had jobs he wouldn't have wanted.

24. I've gone to big stadium rock concerts at some artist's invitation, and there's this invariable, fascinating and rather sad situation of concentric circles of availability. There are Green Rooms within Green Rooms literally within Green Rooms. There are seven or eight degrees of exclusivity, and within each circle of exclusivity, everyone is so happy to be there, and they don't know that the next level exists.

25. The nature of emergent technology is, as Kevin Kelly once said, right out of control. It's an element of human evolution that's completely out of control. It's sort of driving itself, and I don't see it ceasing to do that.

26. Magazines in the traditional sense were aggregators of novelty. A good magazine was a lot of novelty, stuff you've never heard of before, clearly aggregated by people who have been able to travel further and dig deeper than you have been able to do. And that used to be really an important source of stuff for me. And now it is less important because the Internet has eaten it all up. But my Twitter feed as an aggregator of novelty is like... I don't know what I would do if it became any more powerful, I would have to start reining it in somehow.

27. She walked on, comforted by the surf, by the one perpetual moment of beach-time, the now-and-always of it.

28. Damien is a friend. Their boy-girl Lego doesn't click, he would say.

29. I don't much live my life as if I was living in a Raymond Chandler novel, which is probably a good thing.

30. The culture is still there, and people are still doing it. I imagine some people are doing it very well indeed. As for me, it definitely was my native literary culture. Science fiction was where I'm from, but on the way to now, I went through a lot of other territory, and I wasn't really that culturally conventional an SF writer when I started.