William Gibson Quotes

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William Gibson

Profession : Writer

Birth : March 17, 1948

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.

William Gibson

The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it.

William Gibson

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

William Gibson

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

William Gibson

'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.

William Gibson

I've never really been very interested in computers themselves. I don't watch them; I watch how people behave around them. That's becoming more difficult to do because everything is around them.

William Gibson

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

William Gibson

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

William Gibson

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

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

William Gibson

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.

William Gibson

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

If you make something, it's an artifact. It's 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.

William Gibson

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

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.

William Gibson

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.

William Gibson

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

William Gibson

I try to be objective about technology. Agnostic, in a sense. Whatever personal opinions I form tend to have more to do with what we find to do with the new thing.

William Gibson

I've been interested in autism since I've known about it, which is more or less since I've been writing.

William Gibson

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

William Gibson