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

Futurists get to a certain age and, as one does, they suddenly recognize their own mortality.

— William Gibson

If you make something, it's an artifact. It's something that somebody or some corporate entity has caused to come into being. A great many human beings have thought about each of the artifacts that surround us. Different degrees of intelligence and attention have been brought to bear on anything.

— William Gibson

The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet.

— William Gibson

Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description, as science writers, but there are bad dreams as well as good dreams. We're dreamers, you see, but we're also realists, of a sort.

— William Gibson

The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

In 1977, facing first-time parenthood and an absolute lack of enthusiasm for anything like "career," I found myself dusting off my twelve-year-old's interest in science fiction. Simultaneously, weird noises were being heard from New York and London. 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. And I began, then, to write. And have been, ever since.

— William Gibson

The future is not google-able.

— William Gibson

All we really have when we pretend to write about the future is the moment in which we are writing. That's why every imagined future obsoletes like an ice cream melting on the way back from the corner store.

— William Gibson

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.

— 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

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length. If not for our excessive vanity and our over-active imaginations, novelists might be unusually difficult to deceive.

— William Gibson

Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking.

— 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

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.

— William Gibson

We no longer grow the full beef of bohemia, It's all veal now.

— William Gibson

We're an information economy. They teach you that in school. What they don't tell you is that it's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified...

— William Gibson

“As broker, I'm usually very careful as to sources.”“You buy only from those who steal the best. Got it.” (p. 91)

— William Gibson

“You have no idea,” said Ralfi, suddenly sounding very tired, “the depths of shit you have just gotten yourself into.” (p. 92)

— William Gibson

The street finds its own uses for things.

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

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.

— 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

"Hey," he'd said, "it's me. Case." 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

Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting change in the world outside. Neuromancer was personality. Neuromancer was immortality. Marie-France must have built something into Wintermute, the compulsion that had driven the thing to free itself, to unite with Neuromancer.

— 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

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

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

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

Dix," Case said, "I wanna have a look at an AI in Berne. Can you think of any reason not to?" "Not unless you got a morbid fear of death, no.

— William Gibson

He found work. He found a girl who called herself Michael.

— William Gibson

Somewhere, very close, the laugh that wasn't laughter. He never saw Molly again.

— 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

Because he 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.

— William Gibson

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.

— 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

The stick-on holograms had actually had some effect on Bobby, because religion was now something he felt he’d considered and put aside. Basically, the way he figured it, there were just some people around who needed that shit, and he guessed there always had been, but he wasn’t one of them, so he didn’t.

— William Gibson

The Gothick girl regarded Bobby with mild interest but no flash of human recognition whatever, as though she were seeing an ad for a product she’d heard of but had no intention of buying.

— William Gibson

Stim was a medium she ordinarily avoided, something in her personality conflicting with the required degree of passivity.

— William Gibson

“Honey,” Jammer said, “you'll learn. Some things you teach yourself to remember to forget.”

— William Gibson

“As I luxuriate in the discovery that I am no special sponge for sorrow, but merely another fallible animal in this stone maze of a city, I come simultaneously to see that I am the focus of some vast device fueled by an obscure desire.”

— William Gibson

He’d grown up in white Jersey stringtowns where nobody knew shit about anything and hated anybody who did.

— William Gibson

Viewing them induced a mild but not unpleasant vertigo, one of the rare times she was able to directly grasp the fact of her fame.

— William Gibson

That’s interesting in itself, because it shows you how adept they were at obscurity. They used their money to keep themselves out of the news.

— William Gibson

Have you ever considered the relationship of clinical paranoia to the phenomenon of religious conversion?

— William Gibson

Found this picture of Angie laughing in a restaurant with some other people, everybody pretty but beyond that it was like they had this glow, not really in the photograph but it was there anyway, something you feel. Look, she said to Lanette, showing her the picture, they got this glow. It’s called money, Lanette said.

— William Gibson

“You were hurt,” Kumiko said, looking at the scar.“Being stupid.”

— William Gibson

Your saving grace, Danielle, is that you make the rest of your kind look vaguely human.

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

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.

— William Gibson

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.

— 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

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.

— William Gibson

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.

— William Gibson

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.

— William Gibson

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.

— William Gibson

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.

— William Gibson

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.

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

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.

— William Gibson

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.

— William Gibson

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.

— 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

The man steps past them, his cheeks seamed vertically in deep parentheses, as though it has been his habit frequently to smile. They do not see him smile. The Tao, he reminds himself, is older than God.

— 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 sat around accessing media all day and talking about it, and nothing ever seemed to get done.

— William Gibson

The old man reminded Tito of those ghost-signs, fading high on the windowless sides of blackened buildings, spelling out the names of products made meaningless by time.

— William Gibson