Top 200 William Gibson Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “I don’t always like writing, but I very much like having written.”

— William Gibson

152. “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

153. “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

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

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

157. “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

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

— William Gibson

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

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

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

167. “Everything, today, is to some extent the reflection of something else.”

— William Gibson

168. “Futurists get to a certain age and, as one does, they suddenly recognize their own mortality.”

— William Gibson

169. “She wondered how powerful money could actually be, if one had enough of it, really enough. She supposed that only the Vireks of the world could really know, and very likely they were functionally incapable of knowing; asking Virek would be like interrogating a fish in order to learn more about water.”

— William Gibson

170. “Gadgets are usually the last thing I think about, and if there’s something new, I’ll get to the store for the final shipment of the first generation when it’s on sale. So I have last year’s stuff.”

— William Gibson

171. “I’ve always been interested in people who aren’t from anywhere in particular. I think it’s all melting. This has been true for as long as I can remember in my adult life.”

— William Gibson

172. “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

173. “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

174. “Novels set in imaginary futures are necessarily about the moment in which they are written.”

— William Gibson

175. “Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description, as science writers, but there are bad dreams as well as good dreams. We’re dreamers, you see, but we’re also realists, of a sort.”

— William Gibson

176. “Sleep takes her down fast, and very deep, whirls her through places too fragmentary to call dreams, then spits her abruptly back to the surface.”

— William Gibson

177. “I don’t think about the real future very much.”

— William Gibson

178. “Ash and Conner are silent. Our three locals have their phones out and seem to be catching up on the news.” “How is the news?” “They strike me as gravely concerned, but not speechless with horror.”

— William Gibson

179. “It’s more the way it is now than it’s ever been,” Cayce replies, a line of Dwight David Eisenhower’s that she sometimes resorts to when she has nothing whatever to offer.”

— William Gibson

180. “I don’t think of myself as being particulary a subversive writer, but I like to think that my work could afford someone else, the extra degree of freedom that I found when I first found science fiction.”

— William Gibson

181. “He couldn’t remember when he hadn’t been able to remember, but sometimes he almost could. That was why he had built the Judge, because he’d done something – it hadn’t been anything much, but he’d been caught doing it, twice – and been judged for it, and sentenced, and then the sentence was carried out and he hadn’t been able to remember, not anything, not for more than five minutes at a stretch. Stealing cars. Stealing rich people’s cars. They made sure you remembered what you did.”

— William Gibson

182. “Whenever the media do try to pick it up, it slides like a lone noodle from their chopsticks.”

— William Gibson

183. “I don’t much live my life as if I was living in a Raymond Chandler novel, which is probably a good thing.”

— William Gibson

184. “I can see television much more easily than I can see features, because the economy and politics of making big, big features seems to me to be narrowing even from what it was.”

— William Gibson

185. “Like when you’re young, you figure you’re unique. I was young.”

— William Gibson

186. “His nostrils were permanently flared, as though he sniffed invisible winds of art and commerce.”

— William Gibson

187. “Encryption isn’t optional, when we address one another,” she said.”

— William Gibson

188. “I’m away for a while. But there’s no cash on the premises, no drugs, and the pitbull’s tested positive. Twice.”

— William Gibson

189. “Case gradually became aware of the music that pulsed constantly through the cluster. It was called dub, a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast libraries of digitalized pop;.”

— William Gibson

190. “I am no spy.” “Then start being your own. If Tokyo’s the frying pan, you may just have landed in the fire.”

— William Gibson

191. “Television has – particularly at the HBO level in the United States – become a completely new genre. Something like Deadwood or The Wire is a whole new thing – there was no equivalent to that medium before. It’s like a new way of telling stories.”

— William Gibson

192. “I’m a reluctant writer of non-fiction, in part because I don’t really feel qualified.”

— William Gibson

193. “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

194. “If you fancy resenting the tedious, I recommend intentional communities, particularly those led by charismatics.” “You.”

— William Gibson

195. “The factory might have given us the millionfold productivity increases that yielded the Industrial Revolution, but it achieved those gains by chaining us to machines, deskilling the artisan and turning him into a cog in the factory, stripped of judgment and dignity and disconnected from the rhythms of his spirit and the world around him.”

— William Gibson

196. “Why were these giant projects so relatively common in Europe? He’d grown up with the unquestioned assumption that America was the home of heroic infrastructure, but was it, now? He didn’t think so. How did they pay for these things here? Taxes?”

— William Gibson

197. “Ghosts are nothing if not capricious.”

— William Gibson

198. “I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity.”

— William Gibson

199. “I’m not a very intentional writer. I try to be as unintentional as possible. What I basically try to do is invite the zeitgeist in to tea.”

— William Gibson

200. “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