William Gibson: Trending quotes

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William Gibson: 234 quotes5 likes

“I was born in 1948. I can’t recall a world before television…Initially there was nothing on it but “snow,” and then the nightly advent of a targetlike device called “the test pattern,” which people actually gathered to watch.
I imagine that the World Wide Web and its modest wonders are no more than the test pattern for whatever the twenty-first century will regard as its equivalent medium.”

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)

“My first impulse, when presented with any spanking-new piece of computer hardware, is to imagine how it will look in ten years’ time, gathering dust under a card table in a thrift shop. And it probably will.”

William Gibson book Distrust That Particular Flavor

"My Obsession," Wired, issue 7.01. 1999.
Distrust That Particular Flavor (2012)

“For more than three decades the Americans had been gradually sliding into isolationism and industrial decline. Space, he thought ruefully, they should have gone into space. He'd never understood the strange paralysis of will that had seemed to grip their brilliant early efforts. Or perhaps it was simply a failure of imagination, of vision.”

William Gibson Burning Chrome

"Red Star, Winter Orbit"
Burning Chrome (short story anthology, 1986)

“Vasopressin makes you remember, I mean really remember. Clinically they use the stuff to counter senile amnesia, but the street finds its own uses for things.”

William Gibson Burning Chrome

Burning Chrome (short story anthology, 1986)
Source: "Burning Chrome" (The Burning Chrome anthology was named after this short story, originally published in Omni, 1982)

“The world hadn't ever had so many moving parts or so few labels.”

William Gibson Sprawl trilogy

Source: Sprawl trilogy, Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), Chapter 39, "Too Much"

“In cyberspace there are no shadows.”

William Gibson Sprawl trilogy

Source: Sprawl trilogy, Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), Chapter 37, "Cranes"

“I'm going to level with you. I'm away for a while. But there's no cash on the premises, no drugs, and the pit bull's tested positive. Twice.”

William Gibson Blue Ant trilogy

She doesn't leave a message.
Source: Blue Ant trilogy, Pattern Recognition (2003), Chapter 36, "The Dig" (Parkaboy's outgoing message)

“Life is more difficult for the serious artist. Time is money, but also money is money.”

William Gibson Blue Ant trilogy

Source: Blue Ant trilogy, Pattern Recognition (2003), Chapter 26, "SIGINT"

“You care passionately about this thing…That is what makes you so valuable. That and your talents, your allergies, your tame pathologies, the things that make you a secret legend in the world of marketing.”

William Gibson Blue Ant trilogy

Source: Blue Ant trilogy, Pattern Recognition (2003), Chapter 7, "The Proposition" (Bigend to Cayce, about the footage)

“There is that mirror−world ingestion of archaic substances, she thinks: People smoke, and drink as though it were good for you, and seem to still be in some sort of honeymoon phase with cocaine.”

William Gibson Blue Ant trilogy

Source: Blue Ant trilogy, Pattern Recognition (2003), Chapter 1, "The Website of Dreadful Night"

“I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that comes with time travelling.”

William Gibson Jackpot trilogy

Jackpot trilogy, The Peripheral (2014)
Source: Epigraph, taken from H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, chapter 11.

“I wish I had a book.”

William Gibson Blue Ant trilogy

There were a few expensively bound and weirdly neutered bookazines here, but he knew from glancing through them that these were bland advertisements for being wealthy, wealthy and deeply, witheringly unimaginative.
Reading, his therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug.
Source: Blue Ant trilogy, Zero History (2010), Chapter 18, "140" (Milgrim in London)

“Mirror-world. The plugs on appliances are huge, triple−pronged, for a species of current that only powers electric chairs, in America. Cars are reversed, left to right, inside; telephone handsets have a different weight, a different balance; the covers of paperbacks look like Australian money.”

William Gibson Blue Ant trilogy

Source: Blue Ant trilogy, Pattern Recognition (2003), Chapter 1, "The Website of Dreadful Night"

“Security wants to know you're a player. Otherwise, you'd steal. Boomzilla understands that.”

William Gibson Bridge trilogy

Source: Bridge trilogy, All Tomorrow's Parties‎ (1999), Chapter 37, "A Little Shit Money"

“There was a looseness to this, beyond her experience of chatbots, but a wariness as well.”

William Gibson Jackpot trilogy

Source: Jackpot trilogy, Agency (2020), Chapter 3, "App Whisperer" (Verity reflecting on Eunice's conversational style)

“If I was looking to be depressed, I’d come to the right place.”

William Gibson book The Winter Market

"The Winter Market"
Burning Chrome (short story anthology, 1986)