Top 200 William Gibson Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Situational awareness.”

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

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

— William Gibson

157. “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

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

— William Gibson

159. “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

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

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

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

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

168. “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

169. “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

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

— William Gibson

171. “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

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

— William Gibson

173. “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

174. “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

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

— William Gibson

176. “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

177. “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

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

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

180. “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

181. “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

182. “Ghosts are nothing if not capricious.”

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

188. “Netherton was watching the intricate texture of her bustier, which resembled a microminiature model of some Victorian cast-iron station roof, its countless tiny panes filmed as by the coal smoke of fingerling locomotives, yet flexing as she breathed and spoke.”

— William Gibson

189. “She looks after him, feeling a wave of longing, loneliness. Not sexual particularly but to do with the nature of cities, the thousands of strangers you pass in a day, probably never to see again.”

— William Gibson

190. “Heidi’s room looked like the aftermath of a not-very-successful airplane bombing. Something that blew open every suitcase in the luggage compartment without bringing the plane down.”

— William Gibson

191. “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

192. “All we really have when we pretend to write about the future is the moment in which we are writing. That’s why every imagined future obsoletes like an ice cream melting on the way back from the corner store.”

— William Gibson

193. “He robbed a bank in Wichita.”

— William Gibson

194. “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

195. “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

196. “I assume that – because you can get degrees in journalism from very reputable universities – I assume that people can be trained to be journalists. I’ve never been entirely certain that anyone can be trained to be a novelist in the same way.”

— William Gibson

197. “People say Americans are materialistic. But do you know why?” “Why?” asked Milgrim, more concerned with this uncharacteristically expansive mode of expression on Brown’s part. “Because they have better stuff,” Brown had replied. “No other reason.”

— William Gibson

198. “The written word still enjoyed a certain prestige here. It was a sluggish country.”

— William Gibson

199. “In Franklins, a million weighs twenty-two pounds. If you want to keep your weight down, go with the Swiss thousand-franc notes.”

— William Gibson

200. “History had its fascinations, but could be burdensome.”

— William Gibson