William Gibson Quotes

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.

you can`t recycle wasted time

Time moves in one direction, memory another. We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.

His smile was the nightmare in my back pocket.(Speaking about Ronald Reagan)

That's something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: The most interesting applications turn up on a battlefield, or in a gallery.

I personally recall that world, which you can only imagine was preferable to this one,' she said. 'Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the result. Handles. Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves.

History had its fascinations, but could be burdensome.

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.

Change is happening and old structures are falling in the form of a "Death of a Thousand Cuts." In other words one grand act is not occuring but a multitude of small expressions on the part of individuals, both slowly and swiftly taking the place of heirarchy and history.

It was the root of street cool, too, the knowing posture that implied connection, invisible lines up to the hidden levels of influence.

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.

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.

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.

That’s what money will buy you, in America,” Brown had said, firmly. “People say Americans are materialistic. But do you know why?” “Why?” asked Milgrim, more concerned with this uncharacteristically expansive mode of expression on Brown’s part. “Because they have better stuff,” Brown had replied. “No other reason.

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.

The future is there... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.

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

The Economist, December 4, 2003

When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.