William Gibson Quotes

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.

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.

Generation X is dead. It has come to mean anyone aged 13 to 55 years old.

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.

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

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.

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

Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.

People who feel safer with a gun than with guaranteed medical insurance don't yet have a fully adult concept of scary.

We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead station.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts.

We see in order to move; we move in order to see.

The deadliest bullshit is odorless, and transparent.

The designers [of the 1930s] were populists, you see; they were trying to give the public what it wanted. What the public wanted was the future.

The street finds its own uses for things.

You must learn to overcome your very natural and appropriate revulsion for your own work.

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

Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.

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

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

The 'Net is a waste of time.

The future is not Google-able.

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.

Gadgets are usually the last thing I think about, and if there's something new, I'll get to the store for the final shipment of the first generation when it's on sale. So I have last year's stuff.

The Internet is part of this ongoing, species-long project we've been working on since we climbed down out of the trees in the savanna. We've been working on it without really knowing it.

Stand high long enough and your lightning will come.

I don't have to write about the future. For most people, the present is enough like the future to be pretty scary.

My problem is that all things are increasingly interesting to me

Laney had recently noticed that the only people who had titles that clearly described their jobs had jobs he wouldn't have wanted.

I have friends who go [Tokyo] frequently on business, and it sounds interesting. I've heard that they have for the first time serious drug problems.

I wanted to make room for antiheroes.

I think I'd probably tell you that it's easier to desire and pursue the attention of tens of millions of total strangers than it is to accept the love and loyalty of the people closest to us.

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?

If ignorance were enough to make things not exist, the world would be more like a lot of people think it is. But it's not. And it's not.

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.

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.

The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience.

His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination.

Upon arriving in the capital-F Future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower-case now.

A book exists at the intersection of the author's subconscious and the reader's response.

Genuinely ubiquitous computing spreads like warm Vaseline.

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

Things aren't different. Things are things.

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.

Secrets...are the very root of cool.

There are bits of the literal future right here, right now, if you know how to look for them.

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.

I've never actually been a collector. I like the learning-curve, but I buy things, sell them to finance other things.