William Gibson: Trending quotes

Source: Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), Ch. 12
Context: That’s interesting in itself, because it shows you how adept they were at obscurity. They used their money to keep themselves out of the news.

Source: Pattern Recognition

Source: Neuromancer (1984)

Source: Pattern Recognition

Referring to his belief that it's possible for religions to help people.
No Maps for These Territories (2000)

Source: Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), Ch. 22

Neuromancer (1984)
Context: The lane to the land of the dead. Where you are, my friend. Marie-France, my lady, she prepared this road, but her lord choked her off before I could read the book of her days. Neuro from the nerves, the silver paths. Romancer. Necromancer. I call up the dead. But no, my friend," and the boy did a little dance, brown feet printing the sand, "I am the dead, and their land." He laughed. A gull cried, "Stay. If your woman is a ghost, she doesn't know it. Neither will you."

Twitter tweet (31 May 2009) http://twitter.com/GreatDismal/status/1986617191<!-- also (1 June 2009) http://twitter.com/GreatDismal/status/1986630272 -->
Context: The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length. If not for our excessive vanity and our over-active imaginations, novelists might be unusually difficult to deceive.

No Maps for These Territories (2000)
Context: Consequently, when I got to Toronto, much to my chagrin, I really, really couldn't handle hanging out with the American draft dodgers. There was too much clinical depression. Too much suicide. Too much hardcore substance abuse. They were a traumatized lot, those boys. And I just felt frivolous.

When asked what will save humanity.
No Maps for These Territories (2000)
Context: Acceptance. Acceptance of the impermanence of being. And acceptance of the imperfect nature of being, or possibly the perfect nature of being, depending on how one looks at it. Acceptance that this is not a rehearsal. That this is it.

Neuromancer (1984)
Context: They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin. Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours. The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective. For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall.

Neuromancer (1984)
Context: The lane to the land of the dead. Where you are, my friend. Marie-France, my lady, she prepared this road, but her lord choked her off before I could read the book of her days. Neuro from the nerves, the silver paths. Romancer. Necromancer. I call up the dead. But no, my friend," and the boy did a little dance, brown feet printing the sand, "I am the dead, and their land." He laughed. A gull cried, "Stay. If your woman is a ghost, she doesn't know it. Neither will you."

Official blog at williamgibsonbooks.com (31 October 2004) http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/2004_10_01_archive.asp
Context: There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt. A point at which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is innately media-related.

Interview with Larry McCaffery in Storming the Reality Studio : A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction, Duke University Press (December 1991)
Context: On the most basic level, computers in my books are simply a metaphor for human memory: I'm interested in the hows and whys of memory, the ways it defines who and what we are, in how easily memory is subject to revision. When I was writing Neuromancer, it was wonderful to be able to tie a lot of these interests into the computer metaphor. It wasn't until I could finally afford a computer of my own that I found out there's a drive mechanism inside — this little thing that spins around. I'd been expecting an exotic crystalline thing, a cyberspace deck or something, and what I got was a little piece of a Victorian engine that made noises like a scratchy old record player. That noise took away some of the mystique for me; it made computers less sexy. My ignorance had allowed me to romanticize them.

Neuromancer (1984)
Context: He came in steep, fueled by self-loathing. When the Kuang program met the first of the defenders, scattering the leaves of light, he felt the shark thing lose a degree of substantiality, the fabric of information loosening. And then — old alchemy of the brain and its vast pharmacy — his hate flowed into his hands. In the instant before he drove Kuang's sting through the base of the first tower, he attained a level of proficiency exceeding anything he'd known or imagined. 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.

No Maps for These Territories (2000)
Context: I think the last time... the last time I had one of those "CNN moments," where I was slammed right up against the windshield of — of the present — would have been flipping on the television one day, and seeing that Federal Building in Oklahoma City lying there in its own … crater, and listening to a little bit of the audio, and … and getting the idea that something, something bad had happened in Middle America. And I had … some … very, very deep within me, something seemed to say, "Everything is different from now on. Something, something very fundamental has changed, here." … Whenever something like this happens, and I have one of these moments, it ups the ante on being a science-fiction writer. It changes … it changes the nature of the game.

No Maps for These Territories (2000)
Context: All I knew about the word "cyberspace" when I coined it, was that it seemed like an effective buzzword. It seemed evocative and essentially meaningless. It was suggestive of something, but had no real semantic meaning, even for me, as I saw it emerge on the page.

When asked what will save humanity.
No Maps for These Territories (2000)
Context: Acceptance. Acceptance of the impermanence of being. And acceptance of the imperfect nature of being, or possibly the perfect nature of being, depending on how one looks at it. Acceptance that this is not a rehearsal. That this is it.

Official blog at williamgibsonbooks.com (31 October 2004) http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/2004_10_01_archive.asp
Context: There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt. A point at which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is innately media-related.