Top 10 William Gibson Quotes at QuotationFun

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On the most basic level, computers in my books are simply a metaphor for human memory: I'm interested in the hows and whys of memory, the ways it defines who and what we are, in how easily memory is subject to revision. When I was writing Neuromancer, it was wonderful to be able to tie a lot of these interests into the computer metaphor. It wasn't until I could finally afford a computer of my own that I found out there's a drive mechanism inside - this little thing that spins around. I'd been expecting an exotic crystalline thing, a cyberspace deck or something, and what I got was a little piece of a Victorian engine that made noises like a scratchy old record player. That noise took away some of the mystique for me; it made computers less sexy. My ignorance had allowed me to romanticize them.

Interview with Larry McCaffery in Storming the Reality Studio : A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction - December 1991.

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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.

No Maps for These Territories - 1996.

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The future is not google-able.

Comments at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books, San Francisco, California - 5 February 2004.

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The past is past, the future unformed. There is only the moment, and that is where he prefers to be.

All Tomorrow's Parties‎ - 2003 - Formal Absences of Precious Things.

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I didn't imagine that art girls in the Midwest would be flashing their tits in cyberspace...but I'm glad that they're doing it.

No Maps for These Territories - 1996 - Asked whether the Internet is how he imagined it would be.

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Somewhere, very close, the laugh that wasn't laughter. He never saw Molly again.

Neuromancer - 1984.

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They sat around accessing media all day and talking about it, and nothing ever seemed to get done.

All Tomorrow's Parties‎ - 2003 - Sharehouse.

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I think of religions as franchise operations. Like chicken franchise operations. But that doesn't mean there's no chicken, right?

No Maps for These Territories - 1996 - Referring to his belief that it's possible for religions to help people.

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It will bring about the extinction of the nation-state as we know it... I think it will be as big a deal as the creation of cities.

No Maps for These Territories - 1996 - Referring to the Internet.

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I became so frustrated with my inability to physically move the characters through the imaginary narrative space, that I actually developed an early form of imaginary VR technology that sort of covered my ass ... all they had to do was switch tapes and be in a different place, and I was spared the embarrassment of demonstrating that I didn't know how to get them up and down the stairs.

No Maps for These Territories - 1996.

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