Top 200 William Gibson Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking.”

— William Gibson

52. “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

53. “The present tense made him nervous.”

— William Gibson

54. “Somewhere, deep within her, surfaces a tiny clockwork submarine. There are times when you can only take the next step. And then another.”

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

58. “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

59. “We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.”

— William Gibson

60. “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

61. “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

62. “Fiction is an illusion wrought with many small, conventionally symbolic marks, triggering visions in the minds of others.”

— William Gibson

63. “Sometimes, I feel like a time traveller, cause the only way that we can really travel in time is just to get older.”

— William Gibson

64. “Their aesthetic, if you haven’t noticed, is about benign skin cancers, supernumerary nipples. Conventional tattoos belong firmly among the iconics of the hegemon. It’s like wearing your cock ring to meet the pope, and making sure he sees it. Actually, it’s worse than that. What are they like?”

— William Gibson

65. “Are you familiar with the strategic concept of competitive control areas?” Ash asked. “Yes,” Stets said.”

— William Gibson

66. “If ignorance were enough to make things not exist, the world would be more like a lot of people think it is. But it’s not. And it’s not.”

— William Gibson

67. “I was afraid to watch ‘Blade Runner’ in the theater because I was afraid the movie would be better than what I myself had been able to imagine. In a way, I was right to be afraid, because even the first few minutes were better.”

— William Gibson

68. “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

69. “A sense of the Finn’s presence surrounded him, smell of Cuban cigarettes, smoke locked in musty tweed, old machines given up to the mineral rituals of rust.”

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

71. “I think with one exception I’ve never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed.”

— William Gibson

72. “All my life I’ve encountered people who were obsessed with one particular class of object or experience, who were constantly pursuing that thing. Since I was a little kid, I hadn’t afforded myself the opportunity, I guess, to have a hobby.”

— William Gibson

73. “He sat on the bed for a long time, savoring the new thing, the treasure. Rage.”

— William Gibson

74. “Power, in Case’s world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldn’t kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access the vast banks of corporate memory...”

— William Gibson

75. “And don’t forget to water the fuckin’ goldfish.”

— William Gibson

76. “Laney had recently noticed that the only people who had titles that clearly described their jobs had jobs he wouldn’t have wanted.”

— William Gibson

77. “Why shouldn’t we give our teachers a license to obtain software, all software, any software, for nothing? Does anyone demand a licensing fee, each time a child is taught the alphabet?”

— William Gibson

78. “The charges have to do with conspiracy to augment an artificial intelligence.”

— William Gibson

79. “Armitage smiled, a smile that meant as much as the twitch of some insect’s antenna.”

— William Gibson

80. “Even the delusionally paranoid have enemies.”

— William Gibson

81. “Some people dote on contemplating disasters.”

— William Gibson

82. “Tim Powers is a brilliant writer.”

— William Gibson

83. “Enlightenment is “being,” and it grows; it’s end is serenity.”

— William Gibson

84. “Singaporeans seemed generally quite loathe to discuss these more intimate policies of government with a curious foreign visitor who was more than twice as tall as the average human, and who sweated slowly but continuously, like and aged cheese.”

— William Gibson

85. “You can’t get clever men to fight such a system, as it makes too much sense to ’em.”

— William Gibson

86. “When you raise the dead, they bring their baggage.”

— William Gibson

87. “I speak as one who can no longer tolerate that simple state, the cells of my body having opted for the quixotic pursuit of individual careers.”

— William Gibson

88. “He’d lived for so long on a constant edge of anxiety that he’d almost forgotten what real fear was.”

— William Gibson

89. “So Hosaka’s built a regular little neurosurgery and staffed it with three hotshots. Two of them are company men, the third’s a Korean who knows black medicine from both ends.”

— William Gibson

90. “I’ve been interested in autism since I’ve known about it, which is more or less since I’ve been writing.”

— William Gibson

91. “Beyond ego, beyond personality, beyond awareness, he moved, Kuang moving with him, evading his attackers with an ancient dance, Hideo’s dance, grace of the mind-body interface granted him, in that second, by the clarity and singleness of his wish to die.”

— William Gibson

92. “He never saw Molly again.”

— William Gibson

93. “I had a list of things that science fiction, particularly American science fiction, to me seemed to do with tedious regularity. One was to not have strong female protagonists. One was to envision the future, whatever it was, as America.”

— William Gibson

94. “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.”

— William Gibson

95. “The room was empty, aside from the wide pink bedslab and two nylon bags, new and identical, that lay beside it. Blank walls, no windows, a single white-painted steel firedoor. The walls were coated with countless layers of white latex paint. Factory space. He knew this kind of room, this kind of building; the tenants would operate in the interzone where art wasn’t quite crime, crime not quite art.”

— William Gibson

96. “Algorithms are called the aunties. They’re self-organising and so nobody fully understands them.”

— William Gibson

97. “Statistically, almost nobody ever wins the lottery. Statistically, terrorist attacks almost never happen.”

— William Gibson

98. “The dubious niche Case had carved for himself in the criminal ecology of Night City had been cut out with lies, scooped out a night at a time with betrayal.”

— William Gibson

99. “CYBERSPACE, AS THE deck presented it, had no particular relationship with the deck’s physical whereabouts. When Case jacked in, he opened his eyes to the familiar configuration of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority’s Aztec pyramid of data.”

— William Gibson

100. “If there’s anything better, God kept it for himself.”

— William Gibson