William Gibson: Trending quotes

“Loss is not without its curious advantages for the artist. Major traumatic breaks are pretty common in the biographies of artists I respect.”

Neuromancer (1984)

“As broker, I'm usually very careful as to sources.”
“You buy only from those who steal the best. Got it.”

Interview in The New York Times Magazine (19 August 2007)

William Gibson book Johnny Mnemonic

Source: Johnny Mnemonic (1981), p. 91

“When did you ever go to a drug dealer, and the drug dealer said, "you know, you should come back tomorrow, this is not very pure."”

“He found work.
He found a girl who called herself Michael.”

It doesn't happen.
Source: No Maps for These Territories (2000)

“Hate," Case said. "Who do I hate? You tell me." "Who do you love?”

Neuromancer (1984)

“Your saving grace, Danielle, is that you make the rest of your kind look vaguely human.”

the Finn's voice asked.
Neuromancer (1984)

“Found this picture of Angie laughing in a restaurant with some other people, everybody pretty but beyond that it was like they had this glow, not really in the photograph but it was there anyway, something you feel. Look, she said to Lanette, showing her the picture, they got this glow.
It’s called money, Lanette said.”

Source: Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), Ch. 25

“The Gothick girl regarded Bobby with mild interest but no flash of human recognition whatever, as though she were seeing an ad for a product she’d heard of but had no intention of buying.”

Source: Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), Ch. 19

“Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway.”

Source: Count Zero (1986), Ch. 6

“All any drug amounts to is tweaking the incoming data. You have to be incredibly self-centered or pathetic to be satisfied with simply tweaking the incoming data.”

On Turner, in Ch. 1
Count Zero (1986)

“Have you ever considered the relationship of clinical paranoia to the phenomenon of religious conversion?”

No Maps for These Territories (2000)

“They'd left the place littered with the abstract white forms of the foam packing units, with crumpled plastic film and hundreds of tiny foam beads. The Ono-Sendai; next year's most expensive Hosaka computer; a Sony monitor; a dozen disks of corporate-grade ice; a Braun coffee maker.”

Source: Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), Ch. 13

“As I luxuriate in the discovery that I am no special sponge for sorrow, but merely another fallible animal in this stone maze of a city, I come simultaneously to see that I am the focus of some vast device fueled by an obscure desire.”

Neuromancer (1984)

“We no longer grow the full beef of bohemia, It's all veal now.”

On Marly Krushkhova
Count Zero (1986)

“The straight world didn't end. The straight world and the other world had bled into one another and produced the world that we live in today.”

Intelligence Squared on 'Zero History' with Cory Doctorow https://soundcloud.com/intelligence2/william-gibson-on-zero-history (5th October 2010)

“He’d grown up in white Jersey stringtowns where nobody knew shit about anything and hated anybody who did.”

No Maps for These Territories (2000)

“The stick-on holograms had actually had some effect on Bobby, because religion was now something he felt he’d considered and put aside. Basically, the way he figured it, there were just some people around who needed that shit, and he guessed there always had been, but he wasn’t one of them, so he didn’t.”

Source: Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), Ch. 2