Top 200 William Gibson Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 2 of 5

51. “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

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

— William Gibson

53. “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

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

— William Gibson

55. “Upon arriving in the capital-F Future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower-case now.”

— William Gibson

56. “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

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

— William Gibson

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “The future is there,” Cayce hears herself say, “looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.”

— William Gibson

62. “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

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

— William Gibson

64. “The present tense made him nervous.”

— William Gibson

65. “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

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

— William Gibson

67. “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

68. “That evil wasn’t glamorous, but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room, however that might happen, to become its bigger self. Bigger, with more horrible results, but never more than the cumulative weight of ordinary human baseness.”

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

70. “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

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

— William Gibson

72. “Architectural photography can involve a lot of waiting; the building becomes a kind of sundial, while you wait for a shadow to crawl away from a detail you want, or for the mass and balance of the structure to reveal itself in a certain way.”

— William Gibson

73. “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

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

— William Gibson

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “Because people who couldn’t imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn’t need to imagine, because they already were.”

— William Gibson

79. “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

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

— William Gibson

81. “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

82. “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

83. “Authoritarian societies are inherently corrupt, and corrupt societies are inherently unstable. Rule of thieves brings collapse, eventually, because they can’t stop stealing.”

— William Gibson

84. “Even the delusionally paranoid have enemies.”

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

86. “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

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

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

91. “I do not think an enormous permanent underclass is a very good thing to have if you’re attempting to operate something that at least pretends sometimes to be a democracy.”

— William Gibson

92. “Tim Powers is a brilliant writer.”

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

95. “Some people dote on contemplating disasters.”

— William Gibson

96. “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

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

— William Gibson

98. “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

99. “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

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

— William Gibson