William Gibson: Use

William Gibson is American-Canadian speculative fiction novelist and founder of the cyberpunk subgenre. Explore interesting quotes on use.
William Gibson: 234 quotes5 likes

“They used their money to keep themselves out of the news.”

William Gibson book Mona Lisa Overdrive

Source: Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), Ch. 12
Context: That’s interesting in itself, because it shows you how adept they were at obscurity. They used their money to keep themselves out of the news.

“The future is there," Cayce hears herself say, "looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.”

William Gibson book Pattern Recognition

Source: Pattern Recognition

“The future is there… looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.”

William Gibson book Pattern Recognition

Source: Pattern Recognition

“I think I'd probably tell you that it's easier to desire and pursue the attention of tens of millions of total strangers than it is to accept the love and loyalty of the people closest to us.”

William Gibson book Idoru

Source: Idoru

“The street finds its own uses for things.”

William Gibson Burning Chrome

Burning Chrome (1982)

“Another example — maybe a better one, in a way — was when it was confirmed that Michael Jackson was going to marry Elvis Presley's daughter. [loud, game-show buzzer noise] A good friend of mine in the States faxed me, and he simply … he said, "This makes your job more difficult." And I knew exactly, I knew exactly what he meant. 'Cos something … a scenario that seemed to belong to the universe of the late Terry Southern, was suddenly, suddenly real. It's that truth-is-stranger-than-fiction factor keeps getting jacked up on us on a fairly regular, maybe even exponential, basis. I think that's something peculiar to our time. I don't think our grandparents had to live with that.”

William Gibson

No Maps for These Territories (2000)

“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.”

William Gibson

On dodging the draft and moving to Toronto
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)

“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)