William Gibson quotes - page 3

It's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. (William Gibson)
Generation X is dead. It has come to mean anyone aged 13 to 55 years old. View quote
William Gibson
The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience. View quote
William Gibson
Why shouldn't we give our teachers a license to obtain software, all software, any software, for nothing? Does anyone demand a licensing fee, each time a child is taught the alphabet? View quote
William Gibson
For years I have been mourning and not for my dead, it is for this boy for whatever corner in my heart died when his childhood slid out of my arms. View quote
William Gibson
As broker, I'm usually very careful as to sources.” "You buy only from those who steal the best. Got it. View quote
William Gibson
For more than three decades the Americans had been gradually sliding into isolationism and industrial decline. Space, he thought ruefully, they should have gone into space. He'd never understood the strange paralysis of will that had seemed to grip their brilliant early efforts. Or perhaps it was simply a failure of imagination, of vision. View quote
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. View quote
William Gibson
I think that technologies are morally neutral until we apply them. It's only when we use them for good or for evil that they become good or evil. View quote
William Gibson
I don't have to write about the future. For most people, the present is enough like the future to be pretty scary. View quote
William Gibson
Secrets... are the very root of cool. (William Gibson)
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. View quote
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. View quote
William Gibson
If your woman is a ghost, she doesn't know it. Neither will you. View quote
William Gibson
I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here. View quote
William Gibson
Your fiction has depicted wide class gulfs in which "lowlifes" co-exist with the rich corporations ... - I depict those socioeconomic gulfs because they exist and because most of the imagined futures I grew up with tended not to depict them. Migration to cities is now so powerful, so universal, that people will create cities, of sorts, simply through migration-cities that literally consist mainly of the people who inhabit them on a given day. View quote
William Gibson
The Internet, which I think of as a sort of meta-city, has made it possible for people who don't live in cities... View quote
William Gibson
Somewhere, very close, the laugh that wasn't laughter. He never saw Molly again. View quote
William Gibson
Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you'd break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks. View quote
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. View quote
William Gibson
"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. (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." View quote
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.' View quote
William Gibson
Honey,” Jammer said, "you'll learn. Some things you teach yourself to remember to forget. View quote
William Gibson
Don' 'stand you, mon, but we mus' move by Jah Love, each one. View quote
William Gibson