William Gibson

“To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing.”

“Voodou isn’t like that. It isn’t concerned with notions of salvation and transcendence. What it’s about is getting things done. You follow me? In out system, there are many gods, spirits. Pa...”

“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.”

“Time moves in one direction, memory another. We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.”

“The history of the past, a hundred years from now, won't be the history of the past that we learned in school because much more will have been revealed, and adjectives we can't even imagine...”

“Why shouldn't we give our teachers a license to obtain software, all software, any software, for nothing? Does anyone demand a licensing fee, each time a child is taught the alphabet?”

“I guess Twitter is the first thing that has been attractive to me as social media. I never felt the least draw to Facebook or MySpace. I've been involved anonymously in some tiny listservs,...”

“I'm not a computer guy. I'm like an anthropologist. I'm fascinated with people's obsessions. I've learned to wear them.”

“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 happeni...”

“I'm interested in how people all over the world array themselves and go forth in the morning to do whatever they have to do to make a living.”

“A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my own career want list. That label enabled mainstream science fiction to safely assimilate our dissident influe...”

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

“I was afraid to watch 'Blade Runner' in the theater because I was afraid the movie would be better than what I myself had been able to imagine. In a way, I was right to be afraid, because ev...”

“And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.”

“I grew up in southwestern Virginia. I was born in South Carolina, but only because my parents had a vacation cabin or something there on the beach. I was like a summer baby. But I did grow u...”

“A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and cons...”

“I read a great deal of science fiction with consummate pleasure between, say, the ages of 12 and 16. Then I got away from it. In my mid- to late 20s, I started trying to write it.”

“I'd always maintained that much of the anarchy and craziness of the early Internet had a lot to do with the fact that governments just hadn't realised it was there.”

“'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. 'E...”

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts.”