Top 200 William Gibson Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The future has already arrived. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.”

— William Gibson

2. “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

— William Gibson

3. “Time moves in one direction, memory in another.”

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

5. “When you want to know how things really work, study them when they’re coming apart.”

— William Gibson

6. “The future is not google-able.”

— William Gibson

7. “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination.”

— William Gibson

8. “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.”

— William Gibson

9. “Time is money, but also money is money.”

— William Gibson

10. “Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.”

— William Gibson

11. “We see in order to move; we move in order to see.”

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

13. “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

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

— William Gibson

15. “The street finds its own uses for things.”

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

17. “He took a duck in the face at 250 knots.”

— William Gibson

18. “My problem is that all things are increasingly interesting to me.”

— William Gibson

19. “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

20. “Stand high long enough and your lightning will come.”

— William Gibson

21. “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

22. “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

23. “The nature of emergent technology is, as Kevin Kelly once said, right out of control. It’s an element of human evolution that’s completely out of control. It’s sort of driving itself, and I don’t see it ceasing to do that.”

— William Gibson

24. “It doesn’t matter how fast your modem is if you’re being shelled by ethnic separatists.”

— William Gibson

25. “I’d always maintained that much of the anarchy and craziness of the early Internet had a lot to do with the fact that governments just hadn’t realised it was there.”

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

27. “Things aren’t different. Things are things.”

— William Gibson

28. “A book exists at the intersection of the author’s subconscious and the reader’s response.”

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

30. “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.”

— William Gibson

31. “When I was a child, science fiction was the first source I’ve found for information. Science fiction was a very very low cultural stream in those days. It was completly below the radar and no one bothered to censurate it.”

— William Gibson

32. “It was hot, the night we burned Chrome.”

— William Gibson

33. “Don’t anticipate outcome,” the man said. “Await the unfolding of events. Remain in the moment.”

— William Gibson

34. “Be quiet, darling. Let pattern recognition have its way.”

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

36. “It took a month for the gestalt of drugs and tension he moved through to turn those perpetually startled eyes into wells of reflexive need. He’d watched her personality fragment, calving like an iceberg, splinters drifting away, and finally he’d seen the raw need, the hungry armature of addiction.”

— William Gibson

37. “The drivers for the jackpot are still in place, but with less torque at that particular point.” He took a seat at the table. “They’re still a bit in advance of the pandemics, at least.”

— William Gibson

38. “Homo sapiens is about pattern recognition, he says. Both a gift and a trap.”

— William Gibson

39. “Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking.”

— William Gibson

40. “It’s about atemporality. About opting out of the industrialization of novelty. It’s about deeper code.”

— William Gibson

41. “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.”

— William Gibson

42. “I’m a really good eavesdropper. I listen to what people say and remember all the buzzwords.”

— William Gibson

43. “Cyberspace is where you are when you’re on the telephone.”

— William Gibson

44. “This perpetual toggling between nothing being new, under the sun, and everything having very recently changed, absolutely, is perhaps the central driving tension of my work.”

— William Gibson

45. “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.”

— William Gibson

46. “I wanted to make room for antiheroes.”

— William Gibson

47. “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.”

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

49. “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.”

— William Gibson

50. “Three in the morning. Making yourself a cup of coffee in the dark, using a flashlight when you pour the boiling water.”

— William Gibson