William Gibson: Trending quotes (page 5)

“"Dix," Case said, "I wanna have a look at an AI in Berne. Can you think of any reason not to?"
"Not unless you got a morbid fear of death, no."”

William Gibson book Neuromancer

Neuromancer (1984)

Death , Fear , Thinking

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

William Gibson

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

Loss

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

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."”

William Gibson

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

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

William Gibson book Neuromancer

Neuromancer (1984)

Girl

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

William Gibson book Neuromancer

the Finn's voice asked.
Neuromancer (1984)

Love , Hate

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

William Gibson book Mona Lisa Overdrive

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

“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.”

William Gibson book Mona Lisa Overdrive

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

Money , People , Feeling

“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.”

William Gibson book Count Zero

Source: Count Zero (1986), Ch. 6

Girl

“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.”

William Gibson book Count Zero

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

“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.”

William Gibson

No Maps for These Territories (2000)

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

William Gibson book Mona Lisa Overdrive

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

“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.”

William Gibson book Neuromancer

Neuromancer (1984)

Coffee

“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.”

William Gibson book Count Zero

On Marly Krushkhova
Count Zero (1986)

Animals

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

William Gibson

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

“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.”

William Gibson

No Maps for These Territories (2000)

World

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

William Gibson book Mona Lisa Overdrive

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

Hate

“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.”

William Gibson book Count Zero

Source: Count Zero (1986), Ch. 6

Way , Religion , People

“As new technologies search out and lace over every interstice in the net of global communication, we find ourselves with increasingly less excuse for…slack. And that, I would argue, is what the World Wide Web, the test pattern for whatever will become the dominant global medium, offers us. Today, in its clumsy, larval, curiously innocent way, it offers us the opportunity to waste time…It will probably evolve into something considerably less random, and less fun — we seem to have a knack for that — but in the meantime, in its gloriously unsorted Global Ham Television Postcard Universes phase, surfing the Web is a procrastinator’s dream. And people who see you doing it might even imagine you’re working.”

William Gibson book Distrust That Particular Flavor

"The Net Is a Waste of Time," The New York Times Magazine, July 14, 1996.
Distrust That Particular Flavor (2012)

Imagination , Time , Search , Dreams

“In the age of wooden television in the South where I grew up, leisure involved sitting on screened porches, smoking cigarettes, drinking iced tea, engaging in conversation, and staring into space. It might also involve fishing. Sometimes the Web does remind me of fishing.”

William Gibson book Distrust That Particular Flavor

"The Net Is a Waste of Time," The New York Times Magazine, July 14, 1996.
Distrust That Particular Flavor (2012)

Fish , Drink , Age , Tea