Top 200 William Gibson Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Observe, orient, decide, act.”

— William Gibson

102. “The dream recedes, but leaves a residue.”

— William Gibson

103. “Understanding otaku-hood, I think, is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the Web. There is something profoundly postnational about it, extra-geographic. We are all curators, in the postmodern world, whether we want to be or not.”

— William Gibson

104. “Cliches became cliches for a reason; that they usually hold at least a modicum of truth, and the following cliche is truer than most: You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been.”

— William Gibson

105. “The past is past, the future unformed. There is only the moment, and that is where he prefers to be.”

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

107. “Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky.”

— William Gibson

108. “She is like a little safe, locked, that no one can open. Perhaps there is a treasure inside.”

— William Gibson

109. “The nature of friendship is such that you never know who will turn out to be your friends, but once you have met them you can’t imagine that you could have gone through life without ever knowing them.”

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

111. “We monitor many frequencies. We listen always. Came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. It played us a mighty dub.”

— William Gibson

112. “His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol.”

— William Gibson

113. “Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.”

— William Gibson

114. “It’s like wearing your cock ring to meet the pope, and making sure he sees it.”

— William Gibson

115. “Genuinely ubiquitous computing spreads like warm Vaseline.”

— William Gibson

116. “I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that comes with time travelling. – H. G. WELLS.”

— William Gibson

117. “Things were launching themselves from the ornate sunburst spires, glittering leech shapes made of shifting planes of light. There were hundreds of them, rising in a whirl, their movements random as windblown paper down dawn streets. “Glitch systems,” the voice said.”

— William Gibson

118. “Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the result. Handles. Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves.”

— William Gibson

119. “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. She’d said it was always a mistake, to believe those people were different, special, infected with something that was inhuman, subhuman, fundamentally other.”

— William Gibson

120. “Situational awareness.”

— William Gibson

121. “Now that is the real thing, the straight goods from the mass unconscious, friend; that little girl is a witch. There’s just no place for her to function in this society. She’d have seen the devil, if she hadn’t been brought up on The Bionic Man and all those Star Trek reruns.”

— William Gibson

122. “Freeside is Las Vegas and the hanging gardens of Babylon, an orbital Geneva and home to a family inbred and most carefully refined, the industrial clan of Tessier and Ashpool.”

— William Gibson

123. “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

124. “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

125. “And this other evening light, rainy, rose and silver, and to her left a river the color of cold lead. Dark tumble of city, towers in the distance, few lights.”

— William Gibson

126. “This was nothing like Tokyo, where the past, all that remained of it, was nurtured with a nervous care. History there had become a quantity, a rare thing, parceled out by government and preserved by law and corporate funding. Here it seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over the centuries to the dictates of some now-all-but-unreadable DNA of commerce and empire.”

— William Gibson

127. “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

128. “I think science fiction gives us a wonderful toolkit to disassemble and reexamine this kind of incomprehensible, constantly changing present that we live in, that we often live in quite uncomfortably.”

— William Gibson

129. “The plus sign is a hipster ampersand.”

— William Gibson

130. “Friday, August 04, 2006 MONUMENT posted 8:31 AM Silver nitrous girls pointed into occult winds of porn and destiny.”

— William Gibson

131. “To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing.”

— William Gibson

132. “Horror. The spiral birth factory, stepped terraces of the hatching cells, blind jaws of the unborn moving ceaselessly, the staged progress from egg to larva, near-wasp, wasp.”

— William Gibson

133. “Damien is a friend. Their boy-girl Lego doesn’t click, he would say.”

— William Gibson

134. “I’m quite good friends with the putative director, Vincenzo Natali, and I’m a big fan of his work, but beyond that, I don’t like to talk about other people’s work work-in-progress.”

— William Gibson

135. “There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.”

— William Gibson

136. “Mary Shelley may well have invented science fiction. I think she did! But after that it seemed to be a boys’ game.”

— William Gibson

137. “But the mind had its own ideas, and Kihn’s opinion of what I was already thinking of as my “sighting” rattled endlessly, through my head in a tight, lopsided orbit. Semiotic ghosts.”

— William Gibson

138. “It was called dub, a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast libraries of digitalized pop; it was worship, Molly said, and a sense of community.”

— William Gibson

139. “That’s one of my favorite things about Twitter: You can tweak your feed into a fabulous novelty engine. That’s only one thing you can do with it, but it’s one of the things I find most entertaining about it.”

— William Gibson

140. “She rode him that way, impaling herself, slipping down on him again and again, until they both had come, his orgasm flaring blue in a timeless space, a vastness like the matrix, where the faces were shredded and blown away down hurricane corridors, and her inner thighs were strong and wet against his hips.”

— William Gibson

141. “I can’t imagine writing a book without some strong female characters, unless that was a demand of the setting.”

— William Gibson

142. “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

143. “The Thirties dreamed white marble and slip-stream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze, but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming.”

— William Gibson

144. “The child saw things that were too evident, too obvious for the trained eye.”

— William Gibson

145. “Molly and Armitage ate in silence, while Case sawed shakily at his steak, reducing it to uneaten bite-sized fragments, which he pushed around in the rich sauce, finally abandoning the whole thing. ‘Jesus,’ Molly said, her own plate empty, ‘gimme that. You know what this costs?’ She took his plate. ‘They gotta raise a whole animal for years and then they kill it. This isn’t vat stuff.’ She forked a mouthful up and chewed. ‘Not.”

— William Gibson

146. “The concrete walls were overlaid with graffiti, years of them twisting into a single metascrawl of rage and frustration.”

— William Gibson

147. “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

148. “There are tumults of the mind, when, like the great convulsions of Nature, all seems anarchy and returning chaos; yet often, in those moments of vast disturbance, as in the strife of Nature itself, some new principle of order, or some new impulse of conduct, develops itself, and controls, and regulates, and brings to an harmonious consequence, passions and elements which seem only to threaten despair and subversion.”

— William Gibson

149. “A nation,” he heard himself say, “consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual’s morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation’s laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn’t a nation.”

— William Gibson

150. “I’m interested in people who become culturally fluent. And when I meet young people I’m often amazed they don’t quite seem to have a sense of where they’re from. They’re like the citizens of the airport.”

— William Gibson