William Gibson famous quotes

Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.
-- William Gibson

#Inspirational #Funny #Life

I'm not a very intentional writer. I try to be as unintentional as possible. What I basically try to do is invite the zeitgeist in to tea.
-- William Gibson

#Tea #Trying #Zeitgeist

Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.
-- William Gibson

#Eye #Light #Mind

Part of the core of my system, is a way of trying to give the characters more control. If I'm practicing making up what the characters will do, it's never good. In fact, when I catch myself doing that, I try to get rid of that section, and try and let them start making the decisions.
-- William Gibson

#Character #Giving #Decision

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

#Wisdom #Time #Poverty

I have this prejudice that trilogies are long, three-volume novels.
-- William Gibson

#Long #Prejudice #Three

We see in order to move; we move in order to see.
-- William Gibson

#Moving #Order

Sometimes, I feel like a time traveller, cause the only way that we can really travel in time is just to get older.
-- William Gibson

#Way #Causes #Sometimes

A graphic representation of data abstracted from the 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

#Data #Cities #Light

I'm interested in people who become culturally fluent. And when I meet young people I'm often amazed they don't quite seem to have a sense of where they're from. They're like the citizens of the airport.
-- William Gibson

#Airports #People #Citizens

The street finds its own uses for things.
-- William Gibson

#Use #Streets

I've always been interested in people who aren't from anywhere in particular. I think it's all melting. This has been true for as long as I can remember in my adult life.
-- William Gibson

#Thinking #People #Long

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.
-- William Gibson

#Time #Memories #Moving

If I meet someone and discover that they're an absolute, very earnest nationalist, it's unlikely that I'm going to get much closer to them. I don't understand them. It doesn't matter where they're from, I just don't get it. I'm a multi-national kind of guy.
-- William Gibson

#Guy #Matter #Kind

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

#Engineering #Design #Want

The nature of emergent technology is, as Kevin Kelly once said, right out of control. It's an element of human evolution that's completely out of control. It's sort of driving itself, and I don't see it ceasing to do that.
-- William Gibson

#Technology #Elements #Kevin

One of the liberating effects of science fiction when I was a teenager was precisely its ability to tune me into all sorts of strange data and make me realize that I wasn’t as totally isolated in perceiving the world as being monstrous and crazy
-- William Gibson

#Crazy #Teenager #Data

We don't legislate emergent technologies into existence. We almost never do. They just emerge, dragged forth by Adam Smith's invisible hand. Then we have to see what people are actually going to do with them, and try to legislate to take account of that.
-- William Gibson

#Technology #Hands #People

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.
-- William Gibson

#Punk #Buried #Cyberpunk

Television has - particularly at the HBO level in the United States - become a completely new genre. Something like Deadwood or The Wire is a whole new thing - there was no equivalent to that medium before. It's like a new way of telling stories.
-- William Gibson

#Hbo #Wire #Stories

Stand high long enough and your lightning will come.
-- William Gibson

#Long #Lightning #Enough

I can see television much more easily than I can see features, because the economy and politics of making big, big features seems to me to be narrowing even from what it was.
-- William Gibson

#Television #Economy #Bigs

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

#Dream #Sleep #Naps

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

#Sun #Driving #Changed

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?
-- William Gibson

#Teacher #Children #Giving

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

#Trying #Fiction #Make Sense

I had a list of things that science fiction, particularly American science fiction, to me seemed to do with tedious regularity. One was to not have strong female protagonists. One was to envision the future, whatever it was, as America.
-- William Gibson

#Strong #America #Female

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.
-- William Gibson

#War #Military #Technology

I had a lot of issues with the genre, and I probably even had issues with the whole idea of genre. I was coming into it with a certain degree of outsider attitude, and I didn't have a long-term plan. But I think the way it's worked out, it's sort of warped into what I suppose you could say is my own genre. If people like my books, they have some idea of what the next one will be like.
-- William Gibson

#Attitude #Book #Thinking

Secrets...are the very root of cool.
-- William Gibson

#Roots #Secret

The culture is still there, and people are still doing it. I imagine some people are doing it very well indeed. As for me, it definitely was my native literary culture. Science fiction was where I'm from, but on the way to now, I went through a lot of other territory, and I wasn't really that culturally conventional an SF writer when I started.
-- William Gibson

#People #Culture #Fiction

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

#Money #Eye #Blue

We're living in a future that's weirder than anybody except possibly.
-- William Gibson

The deadliest bullshit is odorless, and transparent.
-- William Gibson

#Bullshit

I don't think we know yet what broadcast television did to us, although it obviously did lots. I don't think we're far enough away from it yet to really get a handle on it. We get these things, I think they start changing us right away, we don't notice we're changing. Our perception of the whole thing shifts, and then we're in the new way of doing things, and we take it for granted.
-- William Gibson

#Thinking #Perception #Way

It's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information.
-- William Gibson

#Moving #Technology #Leaving

I find it interesting to see people - mostly people who are younger than I am - going to considerable trouble to try to reproduce things from an era that was far more physical, from a less virtual day. That fascinates me, because it seems to be symbolic of something going on in the culture itself, and I also have a sort of innate admiration for the stubbornness it requires to actually make those things physically. It's become incredibly difficult. In North America, we've largely forgotten how to do it.
-- William Gibson

#America #Interesting #People

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.
-- William Gibson

#Soul #Horizon #Derivatives

I think that I've always written about things that are very personal, but initially, I coded everything. I buried everything under layers of code, but the signifiers of my emotionality were there, for me. I knew where the magnets were, behind the gyprock, and the magnets were very powerful. I think they had to be powerful for me, otherwise the reader wouldn't have a reciprocal experience.
-- William Gibson

#Powerful #Thinking #Layers

The ecological impact of book manufacture and traditional book marketing - I think that should really be considered. We have this industry in which we cut down trees to make the paper that we then use enormous amounts of electricity to turn into books that weigh a great deal and are then shipped enormous distances to point-of-sale retail.
-- William Gibson

#Distance #Book #Cutting

I don't think of myself as being particulary a subversive writer, but I like to think that my work could afford someone else, the extra degree of freedom that I found when I first found science fiction.
-- William Gibson

#Thinking #Fiction #Firsts

When I was a child, science fiction was the first source I've found for information. Science fiction was a very very low cultural stream in those days. It was completly below the radar and no one bothered to censurate it.
-- William Gibson

#Children #Fiction #Information

Tim Powers is a brilliant writer.
-- William Gibson

#Brilliant

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

#Media #Gestalt #May

I think science fiction gives us a wonderful toolkit to disassemble and reexamine this kind of incomprehensible, constantly changing present that we live in, that we often live in quite uncomfortably.
-- William Gibson

#Thinking #Giving #Fiction