William Gibson: Trending quotes

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William Gibson: 234 quotes5 likes

“I think of Neuromancer as being, in a good sense, an adolescent book. It's a young man's book. It was written very young-man's-book. It was written by a man who was not very young, when he wrote it, but who was sufficiently immature.”

No Maps for These Territories (2000)

“Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking.”

Interview in Paris Review Summer 2011 http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fiction-no-211-william-gibson

“Somewhere, very close, the laugh that wasn't laughter.
He never saw Molly again.”

William Gibson book Neuromancer

Neuromancer (1984)

“Stim was a medium she ordinarily avoided, something in her personality conflicting with the required degree of passivity.”

William Gibson book Count Zero

On Marly Krushkhova, in Ch. 23
Count Zero (1986)

“Drugs were absolutely central to that experience, but they weren't essential. I only know that in retrospect. At the time I'm sure I would have said that they were.”

No Maps for These Territories (2000)

“Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you'd break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone, with nothing left of you but some vague memory in the mind of a fixture like Ratz, though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks.”

William Gibson book Neuromancer

Neuromancer (1984)

“It's a world where there aren't families. It's the world of a young person going out into the wilderness, cities, and sort of in a way creating a family. You know, it's kind of like… it's not that it's a "goth book," but it's kind of rather the same stuff that makes kids be goths.”

About Neuromancer
No Maps for These Territories (2000)

“In Heathrow a vast chunk of memory detached itself from a blank bowl of airport sky and fell on him. He vomited into a blue plastic container without breaking stride. When he arrived at the counter at the end of corridor, he changed his ticket.”

William Gibson book Count Zero

Source: Count Zero (1986), Ch. 1, Turner begins to recall his past.

“The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-circuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone. Sandstorms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding…The anger was expanding, relentless, exponential, riding out behind the betaphenethylamine rush like a carrier wave, a seismic fluid, rich and corrosive.”

William Gibson book Neuromancer

Neuromancer (1984)

“"Hey," he'd said, "it's me. Case."
The old eyes regarding him out of their dark webs of wrinkled flesh.
"Ah," Ratz had said, at last, "the artiste."
The bartender shrugged. "I came back."
The man shook his massive, stubbled head. "Night City is not a place one returns to, artiste," he said, swabbing the bar in front of Case with a filthy cloth, the pink manipulator whining.”

William Gibson book Neuromancer

Neuromancer (1984)

“It will bring about the extinction of the nation-state as we know it… I think it will be as big a deal as the creation of cities.”

Referring to the Internet
No Maps for These Territories (2000)

“The cutting of Sense/Net's ice took a total of nine days. "I said a week," Armitage said, unable to conceal his satisfaction when Case showed him his plan for the run. "You took your own good time." "Balls," Case said, smiling at the screen. "That's good work, Armitage." "Yes," Armitage admitted, "but don't let it go to your head. Compared to what you'll eventually be up against, this is an arcade toy."”

William Gibson book Neuromancer

Neuromancer (1984)

“So it's entirely fair to say, and I've said it before, that the way Neuromancer-the-novel "looks" was influenced in large part by some of the artwork I saw in 'Heavy Metal'. I assume that this must also be true of John Carpenter's 'Escape from New York', Ridley Scott's 'Blade Runner'", and all other artefacts of the style sometimes dubbed 'cyberpunk.'”

William Gibson book Neuromancer

Those French guys, they got their end in early. <br class="br">William Gibson http://brmovie.com/FAQs/BR_FAQ_BR_Influence.htm <br class="br">Neuromancer (1984), About Neuromancer

“Honey,” Jammer said, “you'll learn. Some things you teach yourself to remember to forget.”

William Gibson book Count Zero

Spoken to Jackie, Ch. 28
Count Zero (1986)

“Don' 'stand you, mon, but we mus' move by Jah Love, each one”

William Gibson book Neuromancer

Neuromancer (1984)

“The past is past, the future unformed. There is only the moment, and that is where he prefers to be.”

William Gibson book All Tomorrow's Parties

Source: All Tomorrow's Parties‎ (2003), Ch. 4 : Formal Absences of Precious Things, p. 21

“Organized religion, he saw, back in the day, had been purely a signal-to-noise proposition, at once the medium and the message, a one-channel universe. For Europe, that channel was Christian, and broadcasting from Rome, but nothing could be broadcast faster than a man could travel on horseback. There was a hierarchy in place, and a highly organized methodology of top-down signal dissemination, but the time lag enforced by tech-lack imposed a near-disastrous ratio, the noise of heresy constantly threatening to overwhelm the signal.”

William Gibson book Spook Country

Source: Spook Country‎ (2007), Ch. 23, Two Moors, p. 117

“This perpetual toggling between nothing being new, under the sun, and everything having very recently changed, absolutely, is perhaps the central driving tension of my work.”

At the Booksmith http://litseen.com/?p=7466, reading from Distrust That Particular Flavor. (19 January 2012).

“It had much more to do with my wanting to be with hippy girls and have lots of hashish than it did with my sympathy for the plight of the North Vietnamese people under US imperialism. Much more, much more to do with hippy girls and hashish.”

On dodging the draft and moving to Toronto
No Maps for These Territories (2000)

“Viewing them induced a mild but not unpleasant vertigo, one of the rare times she was able to directly grasp the fact of her fame.”

William Gibson book Mona Lisa Overdrive

Source: Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), Ch. 12