Top 200 William Gibson Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “He never saw Molly again.”

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

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

— William Gibson

207. “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

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

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

210. “Case had always taken it for granted that the real bosses, the kingpins in a given industry, would be both more and less than people.”

— William Gibson

211. “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

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

— William Gibson

213. “Algorithms are called the aunties. They’re self-organising and so nobody fully understands them.”

— William Gibson

214. “The room was empty, aside from the wide pink bedslab and two nylon bags, new and identical, that lay beside it. Blank walls, no windows, a single white-painted steel firedoor. The walls were coated with countless layers of white latex paint. Factory space. He knew this kind of room, this kind of building; the tenants would operate in the interzone where art wasn’t quite crime, crime not quite art.”

— William Gibson

215. “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

216. “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

217. “Statistically, almost nobody ever wins the lottery. Statistically, terrorist attacks almost never happen.”

— William Gibson

218. “CYBERSPACE, AS THE deck presented it, had no particular relationship with the deck’s physical whereabouts. When Case jacked in, he opened his eyes to the familiar configuration of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority’s Aztec pyramid of data.”

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

220. “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

221. “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

222. “The dubious niche Case had carved for himself in the criminal ecology of Night City had been cut out with lies, scooped out a night at a time with betrayal.”

— William Gibson

223. “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

224. “Observe, orient, decide, act.”

— William Gibson

225. “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

226. “If there’s anything better, God kept it for himself.”

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

228. “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

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

— William Gibson

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

— William Gibson

231. “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

232. “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

233. “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

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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