Top 200 William Gibson Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— William Gibson

Featured in: Future Quotes

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

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

15. “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

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

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

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

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

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

24. “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

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

— William Gibson

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

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

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

35. “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

36. “Fads swept the youth of the sprawl at the speed of light; entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly.”

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

38. “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

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

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

41. “Listen to your enemies,’ ” Bigend said, “ ’for God is speaking.”

— William Gibson

42. “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.”

— William Gibson

43. “Wintermute was a simple cube of white light, that very simplicity suggesting extreme complexity.”

— William Gibson

44. “The Ono-Sendai; next year’s most expensive Hosaka computer; a Sony monitor; a dozen disks of corporate-grade ice; a Braun coffeemaker.”

— William Gibson

45. “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

46. “A middleman’s business is to make himself a necessary evil.”

— William Gibson

47. “His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it.”

— William Gibson

48. “Biz here was a constant subliminal hum, and death the accepted punishment for laziness, carelessness, lack of grace, the failure to heed the demands of an intricate protocol.”

— William Gibson

49. “If there’s a movie of Neuromancer, what I really want the special effects guys to do is make you see, from Case’s point of view, the little acid giggies: the little lines and trails coming off of things.”

— William Gibson

50. “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