William Gibson: Quotes about the world

William Gibson is American-Canadian speculative fiction novelist and founder of the cyberpunk subgenre. Explore interesting quotes on world.

William Gibson: 234 quotes5 likes

“Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting change in the world outside. Neuromancer was personality. Neuromancer was immortality.”

William Gibson book Neuromancer

Neuromancer (1984)
Context: Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting change in the world outside. Neuromancer was personality. Neuromancer was immortality. Marie-France must have built something into Wintermute, the compulsion that had driven the thing to free itself, to unite with Neuromancer.

“One of the liberating effects of science fiction when I was a teenager was precisely its ability to tune me into all sorts of strange data and make me realize that I wasn’t as totally isolated in perceiving the world as being monstrous and crazy”

“To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing.”

“Hell of a world we live in, huh? (…) But it could be worse, huh?"
"That's right," I said, "or even worse, it could be perfect.”

William Gibson Burning Chrome

Source: Burning Chrome (anthology, 1986)

“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)

“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.”

No Maps for These Territories (2000)

“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)

“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)

“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"

“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"

“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"