William Gibson

William Gibson

"Time moves in one direction, memory another. We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting."
35 Quotes
"Time moves in one direction, memory another. We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting."
William Gibson Distrust That Particular Flavor
"The future is there, Cayce hears herself say, looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now."
William Gibson Pattern Recognition
"We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. ... We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition"
William Gibson Pattern Recognition
"She hung up before he could say goodbye. Stood there with her arm cocked, phone at ear-level, suddenly aware of the iconic nature of her unconscious pose. Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places, that had once belong to cigarettes, now belonged to phones."
William Gibson Zero History
"When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart."
William Gibson Zero History
"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."
William Gibson
"The future is there... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become."
William Gibson Pattern Recognition
"The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet."
William Gibson
"It's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information."
William Gibson
"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts."
William Gibson
"I would like to design what people generally call streetwear. I'd like to dress skateboarders, or whatever the older equivalent of skateboarders are. I pay more attention to that stuff than anyone would ever imagine because I'm watching what the designers do."
William Gibson
"I like the idea of people who've had some success in one form secretly wanting to be something else; I have some of that myself. I look for it in other people who've established themselves in some particular art form, and then you find out that they really would like to design running shoes, or edit literary magazines or something."
William Gibson
"The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience."
William Gibson
"I'm quite proud of what I anticipated about reality television from my books in the early '90s, which I based on the early seasons of 'Cops' and on the amazing stuff I had read about happening on Japanese shows and the British 'Big Brother'."
William Gibson
"Time moves in one direction, memory in another."
William Gibson
"If you make something, it's an artifact. It's something that somebody or some corporate entity has caused to come into being. A great many human beings have thought about each of the artifacts that surround us. Different degrees of intelligence and attention have been brought to bear on anything."
William Gibson
"I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity."
William Gibson
"I've never really been very interested in computers themselves. I don't watch them I watch how people behave around them. That's becoming more difficult to do because everything is around them."
William Gibson
"Cyberspace' as a term is sort of over. It's over in the way that, after a certain time, people stopped using the suffix '-electro' to make things cool, because everything was electrical. 'Electro' was all over the early 20th century, and now it's gone. I think 'cyber' is sort of the same way."
William Gibson
"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
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