Quotes by William Gibson

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

All the speed he took, all the turns hed taken and the corners hed cut in Night City, and still hed see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void...

His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass spines.

Case shuffled into the nearest door and watched the other passengers as he rode. A pair of predatory-looking Christian Scientists were edging toward a trio of young office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on their wrists, wet pink glittering under the harsh lighting. The techs licked their perfect lips nervously and eyed the Christian Scientists from beneath lowered metallic lids. The girls looked like tall, exotic grazing animals, swaying gracefully and unconsciously with the movement of the train, their high heels like polished hooves against the gray metal of the car’s floor. Before they could stampede, take flight from the missionaries, the train reached Case’s station.

A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns hed taken and the corners he cut in Night City, and hed still see the matrix in his dreams, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colourless void... The Sprawl was a long, strange way home now over the Pacific, and he was no Console Man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and hed cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, hands clawed into the bedslab, temper foam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasnt there.

The future is already here - its just not evenly distributed.

She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers lightly spread, and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four-centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails.She smiled. The blades slowly withdrew.

The future is already here. Its just not evenly distributed yet.

People who couldnt imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didnt need to imagine, because they already were. Shed said it was always a mistake, to believe those people were different, special, infected with something that was inhuman, subhuman, fundamentally other. Which reminded her of what her mother had said about Corbell Picket. That evil wasnt glamorous, but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room, however that might happen, to become its bigger self. Bigger, with more horrible results, but never more than the cumulative weight of ordinary human baseness.

Mary Shelley may well have invented science fiction. I think she did! But after that it seemed to be a boys game.

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

That’s what money will buy you, in America,” Brown had said, firmly. “People say Americans are materialistic. But do you know why?” “Why?” asked Milgrim, more concerned with this uncharacteristically expansive mode of expression on Brown’s part. “Because they have better stuff,” Brown had replied. “No other reason.

Paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer.But he was also fond of saying, at other times, that even paranoid schizophrenics have enemies.

She hung up before he could say goodbye. Stood there with her arm cocked, phone at ear-level, suddenly aware of the iconic nature of her unconscious pose. Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places, that had once belong to cigarettes, now belonged to phones.

Theyd run all these tests on him and decided he wasnt racist. He wasnt, either, but not because he thought about it particularly. He just couldnt see the point. It just made for a lot of hassle, being that way, so why be that way? Nobody was going to go back and live where they lived before, were they, and if they did (he vaguely suspected) there wouldnt be any Mongolian barbecue and maybe wed all be listening to Pentecostal Metal and anyway the President was black.

Case had always taken it for granted that the real bosses, the kingpins in a given industry, would be both more and less than people... Hed seen it in the men whod crippled him in Memphis, hed seen Wage affect the semblance of it in Night City, and it had allowed him to accept Armitrages flatness and lack of feeling. Hed always imagined it as a gradual and willing accommodation of the machine, the system, the parent organism. It was the root of street cool, too, the knowing posture that implied connection, invisible lines up to hidden levels of influence.

Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky.

Secrets...are the very root of cool.

She is increasingly of the opinion that worrying about problems doesnt help solve them, but she hasnt really found an alternative yet. Surely you cant just leave them there.

Things arent different. Things are things.