Top 200 William Gibson Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “I find it interesting to see people – mostly people who are younger than I am – going to considerable trouble to try to reproduce things from an era that was far more physical, from a less virtual day.”

— William Gibson

203. “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

204. “He robbed a bank in Wichita.”

— William Gibson

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

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

— William Gibson

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

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

— William Gibson

213. “I have this prejudice that trilogies are long, three-volume novels.”

— William Gibson

214. “The zipper hung, caught, as he opened the French fatigues, the coils of toothed nylon clotted with salt. He broke it, some tiny metal parts shooting off against the wall of salt-rotten cloth gave, then was in her, effecting the transmission of the old message. Here, even here, in a place he knew for what it was, a coded model of some stranger’s memory, the drive held.”

— William Gibson

215. “Neighborhoods that mainly operated at night had a way of looking a lot worse in the morning.”

— William Gibson

216. “I can’t do fiction unless I visualize what’s going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.”

— William Gibson

217. “Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places that had once belonged to cigarettes now belonged to phones.”

— William Gibson

218. “I very seldom compose anything in my head which later finds its way into text, except character names sometimes – I’m often very much inspired by things that I misunderstand.”

— William Gibson

219. “What Shaylene saw as Burton’s primary symptom of traumatic stress, Flynne thought, was his ongoing failure to ask her out.”

— William Gibson

220. “As the jackpot got seriously going, after the first wave of pandemics, without EU membership to buffer anything, England started looking a lot like a competitive control area. Lowbeer did what she knew how to do, which by then was run a CCA. But as she kept building it back up, every time another change driver impacted, she found herself using Russians. They knew how to work a CCA. They’d been there before the jackpot hit the fan.”

— William Gibson

221. “Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television.”

— William Gibson

222. “I think I’d tell her about the loneliness of being misunderstood. Or is it the loneliness of being afraid to allow ourselves to be understood?”

— William Gibson

223. “Opportunities to do very badly were manifold. You avoided them. The major part in any success.”

— William Gibson

224. “Cultural Marxism was what other people called political correctness, according to Brown, but it was really cultural Marxism, and had come to the United States from Germany, after World War II, in the cunning skulls of a clutch of youngish professors from Frankfurt. The Frankfurt School, as they’d called themselves, had wasted no time in plunging their intellectual ovipositors repeatedly into the unsuspecting body of old-school American academia.”

— William Gibson

225. “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.”

— William Gibson

226. “The future, eventually, will find you out. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did.”

— William Gibson

227. “We are come not only past the century’s closing, he thought, the millennium’s turning, but to the end of something else. Era? Paradigm? Everywhere, the signs of closure.”

— William Gibson

228. “We’re all doing VR, every time we look at a screen. We have been for decades now. We just do it. We didn’t need the goggles, the gloves. It just happened.”

— William Gibson

229. “Once again, then,” she said, “the divide between the ambitions of conspirators and the desire, among those bringing us word of those ambitions, to preserve whatever aspect of the status quo they themselves hold dear.”

— William Gibson

230. “It’s the long finger of Big Night, the darkness that feeds the muttering damned to the gentle white maw of Wards.”

— William Gibson

231. “No idea. None whatever. That’s exactly what makes it so interesting.”

— William Gibson

232. “He feels it as a single indescribable shape, something brailled out for him against a ground or backdrop of he knows not what, and it hurts him, in the poet’s phrase, like the world hurts God.”

— William Gibson

233. “Google ‘tulpa,’” Eunice said, “you get Tibetan occult thought-forms. Or people who’ve invented themselves an imaginary playmate.” “I did.” “Don’t feel particularly Tibetan, myself,” Eunice said. “Maybe invented, but how would I know?”

— William Gibson

234. “Now Sally plunged her abruptly into the full strangeness of this place, with its rot and randomness rooting towers taller than any in Tokyo, corporate obelisks that pierced the sooty lacework of overlapping domes.”

— William Gibson

235. “The bosses, the big’uns, they can take all manner of things away from us. With their bloody laws and factories and courts and banks... they can make the world to their pleasure, they can take away your home and kin and even the work you do. But they can’t ever take what you know, now can they, Sybil? They can’t ever take that”.”

— William Gibson

236. “Perhaps he has been too long in the pay and the company of those who order the wider world. Those whose mills grind increasingly fine, toward some unimaginable omega-point of pure information, some prodigy perpetually on the brink of arrival. Which he senses somehow will never now arrive, or not in the form his career’s employers have imagined.”

— William Gibson

237. “He could guess the end, the finale. There was an inverted symmetry: Riviera puts the dreamgirl together, the dreamgirl takes him apart. With those hands. Dreamblood soaking the rotten lace.”

— William Gibson