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William Gibson
69 quotes
“Sprawl trilogy quotes”
William Gibson (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bridge trilogy quotes”
William Gibson (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Blue Ant trilogy quotes”
William Gibson (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Jackpot trilogy quotes”
William Gibson (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.”
William Gibson (born 1948) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: He is reported to have first said this in an interview on Fresh Air, NPR (31 August 1993) {unverified}, he repeated it, prefacing it with "As I've said many times…" in "The Science in Science Fiction" on Talk of the Nat…
“The NET is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it.”
William Gibson (born 1948) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Name of an article he wrote for New York Times Magazine (14 July 1996)
“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 (born 1948) first seen 1948 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Since 1948," an essay formerly posted on williamgibsonbooks.com (6 November 2002) and subsequently published in Distrust that Particular Flavor.
“The future is not google-able.”
William Gibson (born 1948) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Comments at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books, San Francisco, California (5 February 2004)
“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 (born 1948) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Official blog at williamgibsonbooks.com (31 October 2004)
“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 (born 1948) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview in The New York Times Magazine (19 August 2007)
“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 (born 1948) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Twitter tweet (31 May 2009)
“Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking.”
William Gibson (born 1948) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview in Paris Review Summer 2011
“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 (born 1948) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: At the Booksmith, reading from Distrust That Particular Flavor. (19 January 2012).
“We no longer grow the full beef of bohemia, It's all veal now.”
William Gibson (born 1948) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Intelligence Squared on 'Zero History' with Cory Doctorow (5th October 2010)
“I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy.”
William Gibson (born 1948) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Johnny Mnemonic" (originally published in Omni magazine, 1981)
“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 (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As broker, I'm usually very careful as to sources.” “You buy only from those who steal the best. Got it.”
William Gibson (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Last week I was in Virginia. Grayson County," Kihn said. "I interviewed a sixteen-year-old girl who'd been assaulted 'bya bar hade.'" "A what?" "A bear head. The severed head of a bear. This bar hade, see, was floating around on its own little flying saucer…Now that is the…straight goods from the mass unconscious. That little girl is a witch. There's just no place for her to function in this society. She'd have seen the devil, if she hadn't been brought up on 'The Bionic Man' and all those Star Trek reruns. She is clued into the main vein.”
William Gibson (born 1948) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Gernsbach Continuum" (orginally published in the anthology Universe 11, 1981. Grayson County is located in a neighboring county to Gibson's childhood home.)
“If you want a classier explanation, I'd say you saw a semiotic ghost," Kihn said. "All these contactee stories, for instance, are framed in a kind of sci-fi imagery that permeates our culture. I could buy aliens, but not aliens that look like Fifties' comic art.”
William Gibson (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hell of a world we live in…" "That's right," I said, "or even worse, it could be perfect.”
William Gibson (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Parker saw his first ASP unit in a Texas shantytown called Judy's Jungle. It was a massive console cased in cheap plastic chrome. A ten-dollar bill fed into the slot bought you five minutes of free-fall gymnastics in a Swiss orbital spa, trampolining through twenty-meter perihelions with a sixteen-year-old Vogue model, heady stuff for the Jungle, where it was simpler to buy a gun than a hot bath.”
William Gibson (born 1948) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Fragments of a Hologram Rose" (Gibson's first published story, originally appearing in Unearth 3, 1977)
“She swam through the submarine half-life of bottles and glassware and the slow swirl of cigarette smoke...she moved through her natural element, one bar after another.”
William Gibson (born 1948) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Belonging Kind" (co-authored with John Shirley, originally appearing in Shadows 4, 1981)
“Coretti didn't know how to dress. Clothing was a language and Coretti a kind of sartorial stutterer, unable to make the kind of basic coherent fashion statement that would put strangers at their ease.”
William Gibson (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The part of Coretti that was dialectologist stirred uneasily; too perfect a shift in phrasing and inflection. An actress? A talented mimic? The word mimetic rose suddenly in his mind, but he pushed it aside to study her reflection in the mirror; the rows of bottles occluded her breasts like a gown of glass.”
William Gibson (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They had better luck with the seashell. Exobiology suddenly found itself standing on unnervingly solid ground: one and seven-tenths grams of highly organized biological information, definitely extraterrestrial. Olga's seashell generated an entire subbranch of the science, devoted exclusively to the study of...Olga's seashell.”
William Gibson (born 1948) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Hinterlands" (originally appearing in Omni, October 1981)
“So now it's cargo cult time for the human race. We can pick things up out there that we might not stumble across in research in a thousand years...Charmian says that contact with "superior" civilizations is something you don't wish on your worst enemy.”
William Gibson (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Colonel Korolev twisted slowly in his harness, dreaming of winter and gravity. Young again, a cadet, he whipped his horse across the late November steppes of Kazakhstan into dry red vistas of Martian sunset.”
William Gibson (born 1948) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Red Star, Winter Orbit" (co-authored with Bruce Sterling, originally appearing in Omni, July 1983)
“The sun balloons!" cried Grishkin, pointing toward the earth. Kosmograd was above the coast of California now, clean shorelines, intensely green fields, vast decaying cities whose names rang with a strange magic. High above a fleece of stratocumulus floated five solar balloons, mirrored geodesic spheres tethered by power lines. "And they say that people live in those things?”
William Gibson (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
William Gibson (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When the knocking came, he knew that it must be a dream as well. The hatch wheeled open. He saw that the woman was black. Long corkscrews of matted hair rose like cobras around her head. "Andy," she said in English, "you better come see this!" "Is he alive?" "Of course I am alive." said Korolev in slightly accented English. The man called Andy sailed in over her head. "You okay, Jack?" His right bicep was tattooed with a geodesic balloon above crossed lightning bolts and bore the legend SUNSPARK 15, UTAH. "We weren't expecting anybody." "Neither was I," said Korolev, blinking.”
William Gibson (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Korolev stared at the man, who had the blundering, careless look of someone drunk on freedom since birth.”
William Gibson (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But why?" Korolev shook his head, deeply confused. "Why have you come?" "We told you. To live here…Who'd want to live out here for the sake of some government, some army brass, a bunch of pen pushers? You have to want a frontier—want it in your bones, right?" Korolev smiled. Andy grinned back.”
William Gibson (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Kosmograd's hull rang again... "East Los Angeles," the woman said. "That's the one with the kids in it." She took off her goggles, and Korolev saw her eyes brimming over with a wonderful lunacy.”
William Gibson (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We strolled past bales of raw wool and plastic tubs of Chinese microchips. I hinted that my employers planned to manufacture synthetic beta-endorphin. Always try to give them something they understand.”
William Gibson (born 1948) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: New Rose Hotel" (set in the Sprawl universe, first appearing in Omni, July 1984)
“But then there are days when it's like they whip aside a curtain to flash you three minutes of sunlit, suspended mountain, the trademark at the start of God's own movie. It was like that the day her agents phoned, from deep in the heart of their mirrored pyramid on Beverly Boulevard, to tell me she'd merged with the net, crossed over for good...”
William Gibson (born 1948) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Winter Market" (originally appearing in Vancouver magazine, November 1985)
“Got my jacket and took the stairs three at a time, straight out to the nearest bar and an eight-hour blackout that ended on a concrete ledge two meters above midnight.”
William Gibson (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I stood there for a long time before I took that first step back. Because she was dead, and I'd let her go. Because, now, she was immortal, and I'd helped her get that way. And because I knew she'd phone me, in the morning.”
William Gibson (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was coffee. Life would go on.”
William Gibson (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If I was looking to be depressed, I’d come to the right place.”
William Gibson (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bets were being made, being covered. The kickers were producing the hard stuff, the old stuff, liberty-headed dollars and Roosevelt dimes from the stamp-and-coin stores, while more cautious bettors slapped down antique paper dollars laminated in clear plastic. Through the haze came a trio of red planes, flying in formation. Fokker D.VIIs. The room fell silent.”
William Gibson (born 1948) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dogfight" (co-authored with Michael Swanwick, first appearing in Omni, July 1985)
“Deke looked at her through a wash of tears. Student. That fed look, the oversize sweatshirt, teeth so straight and white they could be used as a credit reference.”
William Gibson (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Vasopressin makes you remember, I mean really remember. Clinically they use the stuff to counter senile amnesia, but the street finds its own uses for things.”
William Gibson (born 1948) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Burning Chrome" (The Burning Chrome anthology was named after this short story, originally published in Omni, 1982)
“We were looking for the world's heaviest fence, for a non-aligned money laundry capable of dry-cleaning a megabuck online cash transfer and then forgetting about it...It was the Finn who put me on to what we needed. He even had the number. You want a fence, ask another fence.”
William Gibson (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Macao," the Finn said. "Macao?" "The Long Hum family. Stockbrokers." The Long Hum people were so oblique that they made my idea of a subtle approach look like a tactical nuke-out.”
William Gibson (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think the last time I had one of those "CNN moments," where I was slammed right up against the windshield of the present, would have been seeing that federal building in Oklahoma City lying there in its own crater...and getting the idea that something bad had happened in Middle America. Whenever something like this happens, it ups the ante on being a science-fiction writer. It changes the nature of the game.”
William Gibson (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It had much more to do with my wanting to be with hippie 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 (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Consequently, when I got to Toronto, much to my chagrin, I 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 (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source