Quotes by William Gibson

It is a way now, approximately, of being at home. The forum has become one of the most consistent places of her life, like a familiar cafe that exists someone outside geography and beyond time zones. There are perhaps twenty regular posters on F:F:F:, and some muchlarger and uncounted number of lurkers. And right now there are three people in Chat. But theres no way of knowing exactly who until you are in there, and the chat room she finds not so comforting. Its strange even with friends, like sitting in a pitch-dark cellar conversing with people at a distance of about fifteen feet. the hectic speed, and the brevity of the lines in the thread, plus the feeling that everyone is talking at once, at counmter-purposes, deter her.

Our best analyst thinks its not a tactical design. Something for mall ninjas....Young men who dress to feel theyll be mistaken for having special capability. A species of cosplay, really. Endemic. Lots of boys are playing soldier now. The men who run the world arent, and neither are the boys most effectively bent on running it next. Or the ones whore actually having to be soldiers, of course. But many of the rest have gone gear-queer, to one extent or another.

Shes right, Kates right, Im right and youre wrong. If you drive her away from here it will be over my dead— chair, has it never occurred to you at on one occasion you might be consummately wrong?

Far more creativity, today, goes into marketing of products than into the products themselves

Hitler had had entirely too brilliant a graphics department, and had understood the power of branding all too well.

She looks after him, feeling a wave of longing, loneliness. Not sexual particularly but to do with the nature of cities, the thousands of strangers you pass in a day, probably never to see again.

Shed first seen Covent Garden after a heavy snow, walking with her hand in Wins, and she remembers the secret silence of London then, the amazing hush of it, slush crunching beneath her feet and the sound made by trapezoidal sections of melting snow falling from wires overhead. Win had told her that she was seeing London as it had looked long ago, the cars mostly put away and the modern bits shrouded in white, allowing the outlines of something older to emerge. And what she had seen, that childhood day, was that it was not a place that consisted of buildings, side by side, as she thought of cities in America, but a literal and continuous maze, a single living structure (because still it grew) of brick and stone.

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

The Net is a waste of time, and thats exactly whats right about it.

Youre from the future, Mr Netherton?Not exactly, he said. Im in the future that would result from my not being here. But since I am, it isnt your future. Here.

Twenty-three D, he said, as a boarding-pass spooled from a different slot. He pulled her passport out and handed it to her, along with her ticket and the boarding pass. Gate fifty-two, blue concourse. Checking anything?No.Passengers whove cleared security may be subject to noninvasive DNA sampling, he said, the words all run together because he was only saying it because it was the law that he had to.She put her passport and ticket away in the special pocket inside her parka. She kept the boarding pass in her hand. She went looking for the blue concourse. She had to go downstairs to find it, and take one of those trains that was like an elevator that ran sideways. Half an hour later she was through security, looking at the seals theyd put on the zippers of her carry-on. They looked like rings of rubbery red candy. She hadnt expected them to do that; shed thought she could find a pay-station in the departure lounge, link up, and give the club an update. They never sealed her carry-on when she went to Vancouver to stay with her uncle, but that wasnt really international, not since the Agreement.She was riding a rubber sidewalk toward Gate 52 when she saw the blue light flashing, up ahead. Soldiers there, and a little barricade. The soldiers were lining people up as they came off the sidewalk. They wore fatigues and didnt seem much older than the guys at her last school.Shit, she heard the woman in front of her say, a big-haired blond with obvious extensions woven in.

Rain woke him, a slow drizzle, his feet tangled in coils of discarded fiberoptics. The arcades sea of sound washed over him, receded, returned. Rolling over, he sat up and held his head.

Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description, as science writers, but there are bad dreams as well as good dreams. Were dreamers, you see, but were also realists, of a sort.

Cyberspace as a term is sort of over. Its 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 its gone. I think cyber is sort of the same way.

Ive never really been very interested in computers themselves. I dont watch them I watch how people behave around them. Thats becoming more difficult to do because everything is around them.

I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity.

If you make something, its an artifact. Its something that somebody or some corporate entity has caused to come into being. A great many human beings have thought about each of the artifacts that surround us. Different degrees of intelligence and attention have been brought to bear on anything.

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.

Im quite proud of what I anticipated about reality television from my books in the early 90s, which I based on the early seasons of Cops and on the amazing stuff I had read about happening on Japanese shows and the British Big Brother.

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