Top 200 William Gibson Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

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

— William Gibson

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

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

— William Gibson

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

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

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

117. “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

118. “Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description.”

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

121. “Japan Air’s orbital terminus was a white toroid studded with domes and ringed with the dark-rimmed oval openings of docking bays.”

— William Gibson

122. “A few stray bits of Lego edged fitfully about among lower strata, like bright rectilinear beetles.”

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

124. “Paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer.”

— William Gibson

125. “The men in bars, who explain every dark secret of this world, Tito, have you noticed, no secret requires more than three drinks to explain. Who killed the Kennedys? Three drinks. America’s real motive in Iraq? Three drinks. The three-drink answers can never contain the truth. The.”

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

127. “I don’t always like writing, but I very much like having written.”

— William Gibson

128. “She’s spoken with Parkaboy twice before, and both times it’s been odd, in the way that initial telephone conversations with people you’ve gotten to know well on the Net, yet have never met, are odd. She.”

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

130. “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

131. “She walked on, comforted by the surf, by the one perpetual moment of beach-time, the now-and-always of it.”

— William Gibson

132. “Situational awareness.”

— William Gibson

133. “Even the delusionally paranoid have enemies.”

— William Gibson

134. “The faces he woke up with in the worlds hotels were like God’s own hood ornaments. Women’s sleeping faces, identical and alone, naked, aimed straight out to the void.”

— William Gibson

135. “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

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

— William Gibson

137. “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

138. “I don’t begin a novel with a shopping list – the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it.”

— William Gibson

139. “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

140. “I personally recall that world, which you can only imagine was preferable to this one,′ she said. ‘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

141. “Music was strange that way though; there were people into any damned thing, it seemed like, and if you got enough of them together in one bar, she guessed, you could have a pretty good time.”

— William Gibson

142. “Unstuck her in time, day-sleeping in her bedroom. How old was she? Seven, seventeen, twenty-seven? Dusk or dawn? Couldn’t tell by the light outside. Checked her phone. Evening. The house silent, her mother probably asleep. Out through the smell of her grandfather’s fifty years of National Geographic, shelved in the hall.”

— William Gibson

143. “That’s something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: The most interesting applications turn up on a battlefield, or in a gallery.”

— William Gibson

144. “Some people dote on contemplating disasters.”

— William Gibson

145. “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

146. “Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is inately media-related. The.”

— William Gibson

147. “They’re still a bit in advance of the pandemics, at least.” She took the seat opposite. “Nothing before the 2020s has ever seemed entirely real, to me. Hard to imagine they weren’t constantly happy, given all they still had. Tigers, for instance.” Picking.”

— William Gibson

148. “Occasionally if I look back at something I’ve written I’ll find one of those that I don’t understand, but that’s a bad thing – the unconscious has dealt me a bad hand.”

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

150. “We’re living in a future that’s weirder than anybody except possibly.”

— William Gibson