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William Gibson
69 quotes
“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 (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think of religions as franchise operations. Like chicken franchise operations. But that doesn't mean there's no chicken, right?”
William Gibson (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Later attempts sometimes involved outer space...I don't remember them. My wife parodied them all, not unkindly, as “His long green ears quivering, Fimo slipped from the rig.”...there was always something akin to “the rig.” Some unimagined (by me), hence unnamed, element of technology. But already I sensed that even if I had somehow come to know what the rig was, what it was for, it was better not to tell the reader just then. “Javnaker slipped from the quantum universe-splitter that wasn’t actually a time machine” would not be good for the reader.”
William Gibson (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Time moves in one direction, memory in another. We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.”
William Gibson (born 1948) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dead Man Sings," published in Forbes ASAP, November 30, 1998.
“My first impulse, when presented with any spanking-new piece of computer hardware, is to imagine how it will look in ten years' time, gathering dust under a card table in a thrift shop. And it probably will.”
William Gibson (born 1948) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: My Obsession," Wired, issue 7.01. 1999.
“I was born in 1948. I can't recall a world before television...Initially there was nothing on it but “snow,” and then the nightly advent of a targetlike device called “the test pattern,” which people actually gathered to watch. I imagine that the World Wide Web and its modest wonders are no more than the test pattern for whatever the twenty-first century will regard as its equivalent medium.”
William Gibson (born 1948) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Net Is a Waste of Time," The New York Times Magazine, July 14, 1996.
“In the age of wooden television in the South where I grew up, leisure involved sitting on screened porches, smoking cigarettes, drinking iced tea, engaging in conversation, and staring into space. It might also involve fishing. Sometimes the Web does remind me of fishing.”
William Gibson (born 1948) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Net Is a Waste of Time," The New York Times Magazine, July 14, 1996.
“Surfing the Web” (as dubious a metaphor as “the information highway”) is, as a friend of mine has it, “like reading magazines with the pages stuck together.” My wife shakes her head in dismay as I patiently await the downloading of some Japanese Beatles fan's personal catalog of bootlegs. “But it’s from Japan!” She isn't moved. She goes out to enjoy the flowers in her garden.”
William Gibson (born 1948) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Net Is a Waste of Time," The New York Times Magazine, July 14, 1996.
“Rather than plug a piece of hardware into our gray matter, how much more elegant to extract some brain cells, plop them into a Petri dish, and graft on various sorts of gelatinous computing goo. Slug it all back into the skull and watch it run on blood sugar, the way a human brain's supposed to.”
William Gibson (born 1948) first seen 2000 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Will We Have Computer Chips in Our Heads?" Time, June 19, 2000.
“I thought of the Garage Kubrick when I went to Sundance for the first time and saw young filmmakers doing what young filmmakers apparently must do to get attention for their work — the public part of which seemed to involve shuffling in a tense sort of lemming-lockstep up and down the main drag of Park City, talking on two cell phones at once and looking near-fatally stressed. The private part, the deal-making part, I assumed (based on experiences of my own) would be worse. Or simply wouldn't happen.”
William Gibson (born 1948) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: William Gibson's Filmless Festival," Wired, issue 7.10, 1999.
“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.”
William Gibson (born 1948) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Larry McCaffery in Storming the Reality Studio : A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction, Duke University Press (December 1991)
“Another example — maybe a better one, in a way — was when it was confirmed that Michael Jackson was going to marry Elvis Presley's daughter. A good friend of mine in the States faxed me, and he simply said, "This makes your job more difficult." And I knew exactly what he meant. Because something — a scenario — that seemed to belong to the universe of the late Terry Southern, was suddenly real. It's 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.”
William Gibson (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This newfound state of No Future is, in my opinion, a very good thing. It indicates a kind of maturity, an understanding that every future is someone else's past, every present someone else's future. Upon arriving in the capital-F Future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower-case now. The best science fiction has always known that, but it was a sort of cultural secret. When I began to write fiction, at the very end of the Seventies, I was fortunate to have been taught, as an undergraduate, that imaginary futures are always, regardless of what the authors might think, about the day in which they're written. Orwell knew it, writing Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1948, and I knew it writing Neuromancer, my first novel, which was published in 1984.”
William Gibson (born 1948) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Talk for Book Expo, New York," 2010.
“As new technologies search out and lace over every interstice in the net of global communication, we find ourselves with increasingly less excuse for...slack. And that, I would argue, is what the World Wide Web, the test pattern for whatever will become the dominant global medium, offers us. Today, in its clumsy, larval, curiously innocent way, it offers us the opportunity to waste time...It will probably evolve into something considerably less random, and less fun — we seem to have a knack for that — but in the meantime, in its gloriously unsorted Global Ham Television Postcard Universes phase, surfing the Web is a procrastinator's dream. And people who see you doing it might even imagine you're working.”
William Gibson (born 1948) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Net Is a Waste of Time," The New York Times Magazine, July 14, 1996.