110+ William Gibson Quotes On Education, Future And Writing

William Gibson is an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer who is widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk. He is best known for his novel Neuromancer, which won the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick awards. His works have been praised for their far-reaching influence on modern science fiction and popular culture. Following is our collection on famous quotes by William Gibson on education, life, love.

Top 10 William Gibson Quotes

1. Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.
2. Time moves in one direction, memory in another.
3. Generation X is dead. It has come to mean anyone aged 13 to 55 years old.
4. And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.
5. I took Punk to be the detonation of some slow-fused projectile buried deep in society's flank a decade earlier, and I took it to be, somehow, a sign.
6. I think that technologies are morally neutral until we apply them. It's only when we use them for good or for evil that they become good or evil.
7. When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.
8. People who feel safer with a gun than with guaranteed medical insurance don't yet have a fully adult concept of scary.
9. We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.
10. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead station.

William Gibson Image Quotes

Generation X is dead. It has come to mean anyone aged 13 to 55 years old. — William Gibson

William Gibson Short Quotes

• We see in order to move; we move in order to see.
• The deadliest bullshit is odorless, and transparent.
• Stand high long enough and your lightning will come.
• The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience.
• Damien is a friend. Their boy-girl Lego doesn't click, he would say.
• Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television.
• The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it.
• To some extent I'm guilty of wishful thinking. The absence of the interstitial I find unbearable.
• We live in an age of seriously crap mass clothing. They've made a science of it.
• The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed. The Economist, December 4, 2003

William Gibson Quotes About Life

I can't imagine writing a book without some strong female characters, unless that was a demand of the setting. I actually tend to suspect that in real life, there have always been very strong female characters, but at certain stages of society, they've been asked to cool it. — William Gibson

We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition. — William Gibson

I've always been interested in people who aren't from anywhere in particular. I think it's all melting. This has been true for as long as I can remember in my adult life. — William Gibson

Things aren't different. Things are things. — William Gibson

William Gibson Quotes About Future

The designers [of the 1930s] were populists, you see; they were trying to give the public what it wanted. What the public wanted was the future. — William Gibson

I had a list of things that science fiction, particularly American science fiction, to me seemed to do with tedious regularity. One was to not have strong female protagonists. One was to envision the future, whatever it was, as America. — William Gibson

I don't have to write about the future. For most people, the present is enough like the future to be pretty scary. — William Gibson

There are bits of the literal future right here, right now, if you know how to look for them. — William Gibson

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

The future's here already. It's just unevenly distributed. — William Gibson

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

The future is there... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. — William Gibson

I don't think about the real future very much. — William Gibson

The future is already upon us, it is just unevenly distributed. — William Gibson

William Gibson Quotes About Writing

You must learn to overcome your very natural and appropriate revulsion for your own work. — William Gibson

Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description. — William Gibson

I've always assumed from the beginning that I had relatively few contemporaries among my readership. Not that I was consciously writing for a younger audience but that what I was doing interested a younger audience, or at least threatened them less. — William Gibson

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length. — William Gibson

I don't always like writing, but I very much like having written. — William Gibson

When I was first writing about Japan, it was at the peak of the Bubble. Bubble popped, but they kept on going. Japanese street style feeds American iconics back into America in somewhat the way English rock once fed American blues back into America. — William Gibson

When I began to write fiction that I knew would be published as science fiction, [and] part of what I brought to it was the critical knowledge that science fiction was always about the period in which it was written. — William Gibson

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. — William Gibson

William Gibson Quotes About Hallucination

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. — William Gibson

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination. — William Gibson

Cyberspace: A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation. — William Gibson

William Gibson Quotes About Cyberspace

All I knew about the word cyberspace when I coined it, was that it seemed like an effective buzzword. It seemed evocative and essentially meaningless. It was suggestive of something, but had no real semantic meaning, even for me, as I saw it emerge on the page. — William Gibson

Cyberspace is where you are when you're on the telephone. — William Gibson

"Cyberspace is everting." It's interpenetrating our everyday reality to the point that on-line is our normal waking state. — William Gibson

William Gibson Famous Quotes And Sayings

Generation X is dead. It has come to mean anyone aged 13 to 55 years old. — William Gibson

He'd been numb a long time, years. All his nights down Ninsei, his nights with Linda, numb in bed and numb at the cold sweating center of every drug deal. But now he'd found this warm thing, this chip of murder. Meat, some part of him said. It's the meat talking, ignore it. — William Gibson

A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. — William Gibson

There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt. A point at which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is innately media-related. — William Gibson

Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm. — William Gibson

It's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. — William Gibson

Sometimes, I feel like a time traveller, cause the only way that we can really travel in time is just to get older. — William Gibson

I like living in Vancouver .It's more a matter of being a Vancouver loyalist. Harking back to what I said about growing up with the inherent violence in the southern U.S., I'm deeply enamoured of, and entirely used to living in a society with gun laws akin to those of a Scandinavian social democracy .It's a good thing. — William Gibson

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 — William Gibson

Addictions [...] started out like magical pets, pocket monsters. They did extraordinary tricks, showed you things you hadn't seen, were fun. But came, through some gradual dire alchemy, to make decisions for you. Eventually, they were making your most crucial life-decisions. And they were [...] less intelligent than goldfish. — William Gibson

Our hardware is likely to turn into something like us a lot faster than we are likely to turn into something like our hardware...I very much doubt that our grandchildren will understand the distinction between that which is a computer and that which isn't. — William Gibson

Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description, as science writers, but there are bad dreams as well as good dreams. We're dreamers, you see, but we're also realists, of a sort. — William Gibson

His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. — William Gibson

I have friends who go [Tokyo] frequently on business, and it sounds interesting. I've heard that they have for the first time serious drug problems. — William Gibson

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

Why shouldn't we give our teachers a license to obtain software, all software, any software, for nothing? Does anyone demand a licensing fee, each time a child is taught the alphabet? — William Gibson

When I was a child, science fiction was the first source I've found for information. Science fiction was a very very low cultural stream in those days. It was completly below the radar and no one bothered to censurate it. — William Gibson

There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul. — William Gibson

"Authenticity" doesn't mean much to me. I just want "good", in the sense of well-designed, well-constructed, long-lasting garments. My interest in military clothing stems from that. It's not about macho, playing soldiers, anything militaristic. It's the functionality, the design-solutions, the durability. Likewise workwear. — William Gibson

I look at [Toronto] and think well, perhaps my grandchildren will someday look at this stuff with the sort of appreciation I once held for Art Deco. Although I've come to find Art Deco quite creepy too. — William Gibson

You needed a new pancreas. The one we bought for you frees you from a dangerous dependency.” “Thanks, but I was enjoying that dependency. — William Gibson

I've never actually been a collector. I like the learning-curve, but I buy things, sell them to finance other things. — William Gibson

If I were in severely straitened socio-economic circumstances and had to move to the U.S., I'd probably opt for Athens, GA, or Lawrence, KS. As boho guys usually do, live cheap in the Left Bank of Kansas. — William Gibson

The nature of emergent technology is, as Kevin Kelly once said, right out of control. It's an element of human evolution that's completely out of control. It's sort of driving itself, and I don't see it ceasing to do that. — William Gibson

To the extent that I can still believe in Bohemia, which I think is very important to me in some way that I don't yet really understand, to the extent that I still believe in that, I have to believe that there are viable degrees of freedom inherent if not realized in interstitial areas. — William Gibson

Somewhere, deep within her, surfaces a tiny clockwork submarine. There are times when you can only take the next step. And then another. — William Gibson

I'm not a very intentional writer. I try to be as unintentional as possible. What I basically try to do is invite the zeitgeist in to tea. — William Gibson

I was once really close to sitting down and having a conversation with a shadowy young woman who is reputed have become a millionaire by investing in Beanie Babies. She was someone that a couple people claimed to know, she seemed to exist, but she remained shadowy. — William Gibson

I loved the Limey [movie]! It's so violent! And yet it's so exquisitely romanticized in a sort of Japanese way, it's a samurai film. Coming out of that, I was really deeply conflicted, because a friend who had seen it said, it's beautiful, but it's not about anything. it's one micron thick. — William Gibson

Friday, August 04, 2006 MONUMENT posted 8:31 AM Silver nitrous girls pointed into occult winds of porn and destiny. — William Gibson

The street finds its own uses for things. — William Gibson

Somehow I think that if Toronto had been forced to wait a decade [from 80th], it would be a better looking city. — William Gibson

I think that I've always written about things that are very personal, but initially, I coded everything. I buried everything under layers and layers and layers of code, but the signifiers of my emotionality were there for me. I knew where the magnets were, behind the gyprock, and the magnets were very powerful. I think they had to be powerful for me, otherwise the reader wouldn't have a reciprocal experience. — William Gibson

It had also been my belief since I started writing fiction that science fiction is never really about the future. When science fiction is old, you can only read it as being pretty much about the moment in which it was written. But it seemed to me that the toolkit that science fiction had given me when I started working had become the toolkit of a kind of literary naturalism that could be applied to an inherently incredible present. — William Gibson

The construct of William Gibson the Writer is coming down, and become more open. It's more of a Glasnost - Transparency! Transparency is what it is. — William Gibson

We monitor many frequencies. We listen always. Came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. It played us a mighty dub. — William Gibson

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. — William Gibson

We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. ... We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition — William Gibson

I worry about what we'll do in the future, [about the instantaneous co-opting of pop culture]. Where is our new stuff going to come from? — William Gibson

Every shop in every High Street in Europe is filled with basically the same stuff. There's a street in every city of the world that has a Gap and Benneton's, and the upscale versions of those. — William Gibson

I'm very primitive in terms of economics. The kind of new business in which stock gets more valuable because the company grows, but there must be limits to growth. But if publishing is expanding to fill that retail space, it seems like there may be a necessary and unpleasant correction waiting down the road. How many books to people WANT? — William Gibson

If you’re fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don’t know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one’s own culture. — William Gibson

Three in the morning. Making yourself a cup of coffee in the dark, using a flashlight when you pour the boiling water. — William Gibson

When I start writing a new imaginary future, I have no idea what it is. The characters arrive first. They help me figure out where they are living and I get to fill in the gaps with that and where we are. So when I get to the end of the process of composition, if I feel that I have really done my job, I have no idea what I've got - and I then spend essentially the rest of my life figuring out what it might mean. — William Gibson

He took a duck in the face at 250 knots. — William Gibson

I've been through the whole western world, and it seems to me that there's more retail floor space devoted to the sale of books than food! There's more retail floor space devoted to the sale of books than there's been in the entire history of humanity! It's grotesque! — William Gibson

She walked on, comforted by the surf, by the one perpetual moment of beach-time, the now-and-always of it. — William Gibson

The Simpson's in Piccadilly has been turned into the largest bookstore in all of Europe! How can they fill it? All of these purpose-built Borders and Chapters and every new mall that goes up has a giant chain bookstore with a purpose-built author reading space, whoah, what's gong on there. — William Gibson

We're living in a future that's weirder than anybody except possibly. — William Gibson

The future is not Google-able. — William Gibson

I wanted to make room for antiheroes. — William Gibson

[When] Johnny Mnemonic was coming out and I realized that all the kids that worked in 7-11 knew more - or thought they knew more - about feature film production than I did. And that was from reading Premiere, that was from this change that came from magazines that treat their readers as players. Magazines that purport to sell you the inside experience. — William Gibson

I had a lot of issues with the genre, and I probably even had issues with the whole idea of genre. I was coming into it with a certain degree of outsider attitude, and I didn't have a long-term plan. But I think the way it's worked out, it's sort of warped into what I suppose you could say is my own genre. If people like my books, they have some idea of what the next one will be like. — William Gibson

All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he'd cut in Night City, and still he'd see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void. — William Gibson

The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet. — William Gibson

For me, the melancholy of the late XXth Century is walking late at night by the Mont Blanc pen store and seeing these things always strike me as simulacra of luxury items. They seem like fakes. — William Gibson

When did it become necessary to explain what's so cool about Japan? Everyone was quite obsessed with it 15 years ago. I suppose it's the only Asian country that developed an imaginary entree to me. That's why I go back. — William Gibson

If there's a movie of Neuromancer, what I really want the special effects guys to do is make you see, from Case's point of view, the little acid giggies: the little lines and trails coming off of things. — William Gibson

His smile was the nightmare in my back pocket.(Speaking about Ronald Reagan) — William Gibson

The written word still enjoyed a certain prestige here. It was a sluggish country. — William Gibson

I'm interested in people who become culturally fluent. And when I meet young people I'm often amazed they don't quite seem to have a sense of where they're from. They're like the citizens of the airport. — William Gibson

There's violence in my culture [from America's South]. — William Gibson

I buried everything under layers and layers and layers of code, but the signifiers of my emotionality were there, for me. — William Gibson

What strikes me about Toronto is that Toronto's great misfortune was to have too much money in the late 70s and early 80s, and consequently, it built in the style of those periods, which is hideous. — William Gibson

I don't think we know yet what broadcast television did to us, although it obviously did lots. I don't think we're far enough away from it yet to really get a handle on it. We get these things, I think they start changing us right away, we don't notice we're changing. Our perception of the whole thing shifts, and then we're in the new way of doing things, and we take it for granted. — William Gibson

Art Deco for me except in its most crazed and attenuated forms, it's jut a matter of taste. — William Gibson

The future is here - it just has not been uniformly distributed. — William Gibson

Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places that had once belonged to cigarettes now belonged to phones. — William Gibson

The street has its own use for things. — William Gibson

It's an American thing, but it's particularly a southern thing, and its romanticization is hyper-Southern. And it's still irresistible to me, even in middle age. There's something that pulls me to that, but at the same time, I have this increasing awareness of how banal it really is - that evil is inherently banal. — William Gibson

[I've gone to big stadium rock concerts at some artist's invitation], and eventually you find yourself in the room with the Radiant Being around whom all this is revolving. It's very bizarre, and it's quasi-religious, or possibly genuinely religious. Spooky. It's a spooky and interesting thing. — William Gibson

Novels set in imaginary futures are necessarily about the moment in which they are written. — William Gibson

I realized that everyone in Western society, in some weird way, believes that they've had the experience of producing feature films. — William Gibson

I don't think of myself as being particulary a subversive writer, but I like to think that my work could afford someone else, the extra degree of freedom that I found when I first found science fiction. — William Gibson

Life Lessons by William Gibson

1. William Gibson emphasizes the importance of being open to change and new ideas, as well as the power of creativity and imagination.
2. He also emphasizes the importance of being aware of the interconnectedness of all things and the power of technology to shape our lives.
3. Finally, he encourages us to embrace the unknown and to take risks in order to create something new and meaningful.