Top 33 William Gibson Quotes

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.

I can’t imagine writing a book without some strong female characters, unless that was a demand of the setting.

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

If I write something set 60 years in the future, I am going to have to explain how humanity got there, and that’s becoming quite a big job.

I’m happiest with people who’ve gotten furthest from traditional ideas of nationalism.

As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair.

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.

I didn’t have a manifesto. I had some discontent. It seemed to me that midcentury mainstream American science fiction had often been triumphalist and militaristic, a sort of folk propaganda for American exceptionalism.

I don’t think nostalgia is a healthy modality. But nostalgia and a sense of history are not the same thing. Nostalgia is a dysfunction of the historical impulse, or a corruption of the historical impulse.

The thing that ‘Neuromancer’ predicts as being actually like the Internet isn’t actually like the Internet at all!

I think that our future has lost that capital F we used to spell it with. The science fiction future of my childhood has had a capital F – it was assumed to be an American Future because America was the future. The Future was assumed to be inherently heroic, and a lot of other things, as well.

When I wrote ‘Neuromancer’, I had a list in my head of all the things the future was assumed to be which it would not be in the book I was about to write. In a sense, I intended ‘Neuromancer’, among other things, to be a critique of all the aspects of science fiction that no longer satisfied me.

I’ve become convinced that nostalgia is a fundamentally unhealthy modality. When you see it, it’s usually attached to something else that’s really, seriously bad. I don’t traffic in nostalgia. We’re becoming a global culture.

I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.

‘Cyberspace’ as a term is sort of over. It’s over in the way that, after a certain time, people stopped using the suffix ‘-electro’ to make things cool, because everything was electrical. ‘Electro’ was all over the early 20th century, and now it’s gone. I think ‘cyber’ is sort of the same way.

I guess Twitter is the first thing that has been attractive to me as social media. I never felt the least draw to Facebook or MySpace. I’ve been involved anonymously in some tiny listservs, mainly in my ceaseless quest for random novelty, and sometimes while doing something that more closely resembles research.

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.

That’s one of my favorite things about Twitter: You can tweak your feed into a fabulous novelty engine. That’s only one thing you can do with it, but it’s one of the things I find most entertaining about it.

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.

I can’t do fiction unless I visualize what’s going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

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 very seldom compose anything in my head which later finds its way into text, except character names sometimes – I’m often very much inspired by things that I misunderstand.

In a sense, if you’re not getting it wrong really a lot when you’re creating imaginary futures, then you’re just not doing it enough. You’re not creating enough imaginary futures.

I’m often saddened and dismayed to see myself portrayed as either a Luddite or as a raving technophile. I’ve always thought that my job was to be as anthropologically neutral about emerging technologies as possible.

Cyberspace is colonising what we used to think of as the real world. I think that our grandchildren will probably regard the distinction we make between what we call the real world and what they think of as simply the world as the quaintest and most incomprehensible thing about us.

I was afraid to watch ‘Blade Runner’ in the theater because I was afraid the movie would be better than what I myself had been able to imagine. In a way, I was right to be afraid, because even the first few minutes were better.

My dream scenario would be that you could go into a bookshop, examine copies of every book in print that they’re able to offer, then for a fee have them produce in a minute or two a beautiful finished copy in a dust jacket that you would pay for and take home.

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

If you’ve read a lot of vintage science fiction, as I have at one time or another in my life, you can’t help but realise how wrong we get it. I have gotten it wrong more times than I’ve gotten it right. But I knew that when I started; I knew that before I wrote a word of science fiction.

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?

I don’t much live my life as if I was living in a Raymond Chandler novel, which is probably a good thing.

All my life I’ve encountered people who were obsessed with one particular class of object or experience, who were constantly pursuing that thing. Since I was a little kid, I hadn’t afforded myself the opportunity, I guess, to have a hobby.

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.