William Gibson

1:Be quiet, darling. Let pattern recognition have its way. ~ William Gibson,

2:When the past is always with you, it may as well be present; and if it is present, it will be future as well. ~ William Gibson,

3: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, [T5],

4:Conspiracy theory's got to be simple. Sense doesn't come into it. People are more scared of how complicated shit actually is than they ever are about whatever's supposed to be behind the conspiracy. ~ William Gibson,

5:To call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed that, once, but now it is real in another way. You know that, Case. Your business is to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names the owners seek to conceal. True names...
~ William Gibson, Neuromancer,

6:Cyberspace is colonising what we used to think of as the real world. I think that our grandchildren will probably regard the distinction we make between what we call the real world and what they think of as simply the world as the quaintest and most incomprehensible thing about us. ~ William Gibson,

7: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,

8:Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from 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,

9: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,

10:Masters of Worldbuilding. Creating imaginary worlds is certainly one of the more satisfying and addictive of creative pastimes. Of course, no one has ever surpassed Tolkien in worldbuilding stakes. And Frank Herbert should be included in 2nd place on this honourable list. Other worthwhile mentions are Lovecraft (Cthulhu mythos), Asimov (Foundation), Niven (Known Space), Jack Kirby (Marvel), William Gibson (the Sprawl), Stephen Baxter (Xeelee), Marc Miller (Traveller), C.J.Cherryh (Alliance-Union), Dan Simmons (Hyperion Cantos), David Weber (Honorverse), Iain M Banks (Culture), Alastair Reynolds (Revelation Space/Galactic North), Kameron Hurley (Bel Dames), and Ann Lecke (Ancillary trilogy), to name just a few.
~ M Alan Kazlev,

11:A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. 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.... The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like live wire voodoo and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temper foam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there. ~ William Gibson, Neuromancer,

12:`No. Stay, doesn't matter.' He settled the black terry sweatband across his forehead, careful not to disturb the flat Sendai dermatrodes [1]. He stared at the deck on his lap, not really seeing it, seeing instead the shop window on Ninsei, the chromed shuriken burning with reflected neon. He glanced up; on the wall, just above the Sony, he'd hung her gift, tacking it there with a yellow-headed drawing pin through the hole at its center.

He closed his eyes.

Found the ridged face of the power stud.

And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames.

Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.

Please, he prayed, now --

A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.

Now --

Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding --And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach. ~ William Gibson, Neuromancer,

* WISDOM TROVE *

* NEWFULLDB 2.4M *

1:Boy, I was daid. ~ William Gibson,

2:Lupus Yonderboy, ~ William Gibson,

3:Everything changed. ~ William Gibson,

4:ADVENTURE CAPITALISTS ~ William Gibson,

5:few stray bits of Lego ~ William Gibson,

6:Fuck it. Just fuck it. ~ William Gibson,

7:N-methyl-4-phenyl-1236, ~ William Gibson,

8:romanticizing pathology ~ William Gibson,

9:carbon ribbon. There were ~ William Gibson,

10:ORDINARY SAD-ASS HUMANNESS ~ William Gibson,

11:He robbed a bank in Wichita. ~ William Gibson,

12:The 'Net is a waste of time. ~ William Gibson,

13:thin and elegant as a mantis ~ William Gibson,

14:you can`t recycle wasted time ~ William Gibson,

15:Earth is the alien planet now. ~ William Gibson,

16:The future is not Google-able. ~ William Gibson,

17:abs you could do laundry on, the ~ William Gibson,

18:Don’t,” she said, “fingerprints. ~ William Gibson,

19:Voytek is here, to fuck penguin. ~ William Gibson,

20:Tim Powers is a brilliant writer. ~ William Gibson,

21:Fables from before the Anaheiming. ~ William Gibson,

22:Something she’d gotten from Burton ~ William Gibson,

23:The present tense made him nervous. ~ William Gibson,

24:Secrets...are the very root of cool. ~ William Gibson,

25:Ghosts are nothing if not capricious. ~ William Gibson,

26:I wanted to make room for antiheroes. ~ William Gibson,

27:I want to have my cake and eat it too. ~ William Gibson,

28:The street has its own use for things. ~ William Gibson,

29:UN’s got deep roots in the demonology. ~ William Gibson,

30:Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination. ~ William Gibson,

31:I know Quine, by the way. Real asshole. ~ William Gibson,

32:It was hot, the night we burned Chrome. ~ William Gibson,

33:Time is money, but also money is money. ~ William Gibson,

34:He took a duck in the face at 250 knots. ~ William Gibson,

35:The dream recedes, but leaves a residue. ~ William Gibson,

36:The street finds its own uses for things. ~ William Gibson,

37:everything a little too smooth and glossy. ~ William Gibson,

38:All the meat, he thought, and all it wants. ~ William Gibson,

39:Case fell into the prison of his own flesh. ~ William Gibson,

40:I had no idea that no one else would do it. ~ William Gibson,

41:Things aren't different. Things are things. ~ William Gibson,

42:Even the delusionally paranoid have enemies. ~ William Gibson,

43:Some people dote on contemplating disasters. ~ William Gibson,

44:and he lived in the trailer down by the creek. ~ William Gibson,

45:I don't think about the real future very much. ~ William Gibson,

46:And don't forget to water the fuckin' goldfish. ~ William Gibson,

47:is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic folly. ~ William Gibson,

48:Time moves in one direction, memory in another. ~ William Gibson,

49:Don't let the little fuckers generation gap you. ~ William Gibson,

50:We see in order to move; we move in order to see. ~ William Gibson,

51:When you raise the dead, they bring their baggage. ~ William Gibson,

52:If god made anything better, he kept it for himself ~ William Gibson,

53:If there's anything better, God kept it for himself. ~ William Gibson,

54:Stand high long enough and your lightning will come. ~ William Gibson,

55:The color of its skin reminded him of Zone’s whores; ~ William Gibson,

56:The deadliest bullshit is odorless, and transparent. ~ William Gibson,

57:a chronic malcontent, albeit quite a purposeless one. ~ William Gibson,

58:History had its fascinations, but could be burdensome. ~ William Gibson,

59:Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye. ~ William Gibson,

60:There's violence in my culture [from America's South]. ~ William Gibson,

61:THEY ATE LUNCH in a Mexican place called Dirty Is God. ~ William Gibson,

62:terror should remain the sole prerogative of the state. ~ William Gibson,

63:Zion smelled of cooked vegetables, humanity, and ganja. ~ William Gibson,

64:Be quiet, darling. Let pattern recognition have its way. ~ William Gibson,

65:The prefix cyber is going the way of the prefix electro. ~ William Gibson,

66:Be quiet, darling. Let pattern recognition have its way. ~ William Gibson,

67:Cyberspace is where you are when you're on the telephone. ~ William Gibson,

68:...destiny spelled out in a constellation of cheap chrome. ~ William Gibson,

69:Genuinely ubiquitous computing spreads like warm Vaseline. ~ William Gibson,

70:The future's here already. It's just unevenly distributed. ~ William Gibson,

71:A middleman’s business is to make himself a necessary evil. ~ William Gibson,

72:The experience of celebrity is gradually being democratized. ~ William Gibson,

73:Enlightenment is "being," and it grows; it's end is serenity. ~ William Gibson,

74:The yellow Lego was brick-shaped again. Pretending innocence. ~ William Gibson,

75:Like when you're young, you figure you're unique. I was young. ~ William Gibson,

76:Somos manchas vivas de aceite empujadas por pasillos de sombra ~ William Gibson,

77:Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description. ~ William Gibson,

78:The future is already upon us, it is just unevenly distributed. ~ William Gibson,

79:Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis. ~ William Gibson,

80:Maelcum a rude boy," said the other, "an' a righteous tug pilot. ~ William Gibson,

81:My problem is that all things are increasingly interesting to me ~ William Gibson,

82:The future is here - it just has not been uniformly distributed. ~ William Gibson,

83:The world hadn’t ever had so many moving parts or so few labels. ~ William Gibson,

84:A few stray bits of Lego edged fitfully about among lower strata, ~ William Gibson,

85:Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television. ~ William Gibson,

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

87:Encryption isn’t optional, when we address one another,” she said. ~ William Gibson,

88:The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed ~ William Gibson,

89:I have this prejudice that trilogies are long, three-volume novels. ~ William Gibson,

90:The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed. ~ William Gibson,

91:The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed. ~ William Gibson,

92:Arleigh’s van smelled like long-chain monomers and warm electronics. ~ William Gibson,

93:Damien is a friend. Their boy-girl Lego doesn't click, he would say. ~ William Gibson,

94:No idea. None whatever. That’s exactly what makes it so interesting. ~ William Gibson,

95:No, she thought, not new; the old, the always, the now and ever was. ~ William Gibson,

96:Reading, his therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug. ~ William Gibson,

97:The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet. ~ William Gibson,

98:We're living in a future that's weirder than anybody except possibly. ~ William Gibson,

99:Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is inately media-related. The ~ William Gibson,

100:The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. ~ William Gibson,

101:Damien is a friend.
Their boy-girl Lego doesn't click, he would say. ~ William Gibson,

102:Know what's worse than imaginary, Leon?"
"What?"
"Half-imaginary. ~ William Gibson,

103:Factual accounts of premeditated violence in the global fashion industry. ~ William Gibson,

104:Generation X is dead. It has come to mean anyone aged 13 to 55 years old. ~ William Gibson,

105:media’?” “I guess so.” “It was an artifact of relatively low connectivity. ~ William Gibson,

106:Stone killer,” said Carlos, like that might be his favorite flavor of pie. ~ William Gibson,

107:Homo sapiens is about pattern recognition, he says. Both a gift and a trap. ~ William Gibson,

108:The future is already here—it’s just unevenly distributed.”—William Gibson ~ Timothy Ferriss,

109:The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet. —WILLIAM GIBSON, ~ Timothy Ferriss,

110:the windows of army surplus stores constituted hymns to male powerlessness. ~ William Gibson,

111:His smile was the nightmare in my back pocket.(Speaking about Ronald Reagan) ~ William Gibson,

112:Noches que con gran cuidado eliminaste de la desordenada baraja de tu pasado ~ William Gibson,

113:The child saw things that were too evident, too obvious for the trained eye. ~ William Gibson,

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

115:The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead station. ~ William Gibson,

116:The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience. ~ William Gibson,

117:The charges have to do with conspiracy to augment an artificial intelligence. ~ William Gibson,

118:Case gasped as his internal organs were pulled into a different configuration. ~ William Gibson,

119:He sat on the bed for a long time, savoring the new thing, the treasure. Rage. ~ William Gibson,

120:It’s like wearing your cock ring to meet the pope, and making sure he sees it. ~ William Gibson,

121:After she’d called for the car, they waited outside while it drove itself over. ~ William Gibson,

122:cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule ~ William Gibson,

123:Every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.’ Case ~ William Gibson,

124:I improvise. It's my greatest talent. I prefer situations to plans - Wintermute ~ William Gibson,

125:The counters that fronted the booths displayed hundreds of slivers of microsoft, ~ William Gibson,

126:We live in an age of seriously crap mass clothing. They've made a science of it. ~ William Gibson,

127:For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. ~ William Gibson,

128:And Willy Jude was amiable enough, but in about as content-free a way as possible. ~ William Gibson,

129:The written word still enjoyed a certain prestige here. It was a sluggish country. ~ William Gibson,

130:Armitage smiled, a smile that meant as much as the twitch of some insect’s antenna. ~ William Gibson,

131:As individuals steadily lose degrees of privacy, so too do corporations and states. ~ William Gibson,

132:He saw Case and smiled, his teeth a webwork of East European steel and brown decay. ~ William Gibson,

133:When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart. ~ William Gibson,

134:You can’t get clever men to fight such a system, as it makes too much sense to ’em. ~ William Gibson,

135:Perched on the edge of Case’s worktable like some kind of state of the art gargoyle, ~ William Gibson,

136:To hire someone willing to undertake an unspecified task, likely involving violence. ~ William Gibson,

137:Which had a top layer of truth to it, but latticed, like the caramel on the cronuts. ~ William Gibson,

138:Zona spat a stream of Spanish that overwhelmed translation, a long and liquid curse. ~ William Gibson,

139:I'm a reluctant writer of non-fiction, in part because I don't really feel qualified. ~ William Gibson,

140:I'm happiest with people who've gotten furthest from traditional ideas of nationalism. ~ William Gibson,

141:It doesn't matter how fast your modem is if you're being shelled by ethnic separatists. ~ William Gibson,

142:That annoying thing that tourists did, opening a feed into London’s sea of blue plaques. ~ William Gibson,

143:A book exists at the intersection of the author's subconscious and the reader's response. ~ William Gibson,

144:Honey,” Jammer said, “you’ll learn. Some things you teach yourself to remember to forget. ~ William Gibson,

145:You must learn to overcome your very natural and appropriate revulsion for your own work. ~ William Gibson,

146:I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists. ~ William Gibson,

147:I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity. ~ William Gibson,

148:subgenres are products of the writers’ urgent necessity to avoid tangling with a realistic ~ William Gibson,

149:Those fuckers,” Janice said, meaning the football players, “they get me doing hate Kegels. ~ William Gibson,

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

151:I'm a really good eavesdropper. I listen to what people say and remember all the buzzwords. ~ William Gibson,

152:Novels set in imaginary futures are necessarily about the moment in which they are written. ~ William Gibson,

153:You are exhibiting symptoms of urban singles angst. There are cures for this. Drink up. Go. ~ William Gibson,

154:You need to learn to overcome your very natural and appropriate revulsion for your own work ~ William Gibson,

155:Neighborhoods that mainly operated at night had a way of looking a lot worse in the morning. ~ William Gibson,

156:stray bits of Lego edged fitfully about among lower strata, like bright rectilinear beetles. ~ William Gibson,

157:Upon arriving in the capital-F Future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower-case now. ~ William Gibson,

158:Whenever the media do try to pick it up, it slides like a lone noodle from their chopsticks. ~ William Gibson,

159:Far more creativity, today, goes into marketing of products than into the products themselves ~ William Gibson,

160:Futurists get to a certain age and, as one does, they suddenly recognize their own mortality. ~ William Gibson,

161:I think with one exception I've never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed. ~ William Gibson,

162:Stability is the beginning of the end. We only walk by continually beginning to fall forward. ~ William Gibson,

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

164:Don’t anticipate outcome,” the man said. “Await the unfolding of events. Remain in the moment. ~ William Gibson,

165:I don't begin a novel with a shopping list - the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it. ~ William Gibson,

166:His nostrils were permanently flared, as though he sniffed invisible winds of art and commerce. ~ William Gibson,

167:maverick techs who liked earning danger money and had proven they could keep their mouths shut. ~ William Gibson,

168:Wintermute was a simple cube of white light, that very simplicity suggesting extreme complexity. ~ William Gibson,

169:a dream long lost in the compulsive effort to fill space, to replicate some family image of self. ~ William Gibson,

170:Coretti no sabía vestirse. La ropa era un lenguaje y Coretti era un tartamudo de la indumentaria. ~ William Gibson,

171:To some extent I'm guilty of wishful thinking. The absence of the interstitial I find unbearable. ~ William Gibson,

172:Annie: Maybe you all do. It's my idea of the original sin.
James: What is?
Annie: Giving up. ~ William Gibson,

173:Far more creativity, today, goes into the marketing of products than into the products themselves, ~ William Gibson,

174:He’d lived for so long on a constant edge of anxiety that he’d almost forgotten what real fear was. ~ William Gibson,

175:I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that comes with time travelling. —H. G. WELLS ~ William Gibson,

176:Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking. ~ William Gibson,

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

178:the smell of her grandfather’s fifty years of National Geographic, shelved in the hall. Downstairs, ~ William Gibson,

179:Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky. ~ William Gibson,

180:poor Byron, whose car had been run over by an autopiloted eighteen-wheeler on Valentine’s Day, about ~ William Gibson,

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

182:I have important information for you.” The vowel in you suggested a siren dopplering past, then gone. ~ William Gibson,

183:Indeed, today, reliance on broadcasting is the very definition of a technologically backward society. ~ William Gibson,

184:I’m not Wintermute now.” “So what are you.” He drank from the flask, feeling nothing. “I’m the matrix, ~ William Gibson,

185:I thought of that William Gibson quote: “The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed yet. ~ Zadie Smith,

186:It’s about atemporality. About opting out of the industrialization of novelty. It’s about deeper code. ~ William Gibson,

187:Lonny Zone stepped forward, tall and cadaverous, moving with the slow undersea grace of his addiction. ~ William Gibson,

188:So you see, Case, you need us. You need us as badly as you did when we scraped you up from the gutter. ~ William Gibson,

189:Do I look like a metaphysician?” “You look like a guy in an office. What exactly do you do there, Wilf? ~ William Gibson,

190:We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self. ~ William Gibson,

191:if poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science-fiction writers are its court jesters. ~ William Gibson,

192:I think that I've always written about things that are very personal, but initially, I coded everything. ~ William Gibson,

193:I've been interested in autism since I've known about it, which is more or less since I've been writing. ~ William Gibson,

194:Wonderful", the Flatline said, "I never did like to do anything simple when I could do it ass-backwards. ~ William Gibson,

195:Wonderful,” the Flatline said, “I never did like to do anything simple when I could do it ass-backwards. ~ William Gibson,

196:I don't much live my life as if I was living in a Raymond Chandler novel, which is probably a good thing. ~ William Gibson,

197:We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting. ~ William Gibson,

198:and his voice the cry of a bird unknown, 3Jane answering in song, three notes, high and pure. A true name. ~ William Gibson,

199:bartender’s smile widened. His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was ~ William Gibson,

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

201:I am no spy.” “Then start being your own. If Tokyo’s the frying pan, you may just have landed in the fire. ~ William Gibson,

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

203:In the nearly total darkness of a Nighttown noon, who notices a few dozen mad children lost in the rafters? ~ William Gibson,

204:and still he’d see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void. . ~ William Gibson,

205:The act of connection produces a fork in causality, the new branch causally unique. A stub, as we call them. ~ William Gibson,

206:The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.

The Economist, December 4, 2003 ~ William Gibson,

207:Was it Laurie Anderson who said that VR would never look real until they learned how to put some dirt in it? ~ William Gibson,

208:Had me this boy once. You kinda remind me . . .” She turned and surveyed the corridor. “Johnny, his name was. ~ William Gibson,

209:Something stilled the part of him that knitted narrative, that grew the underbrush of lies in which he lived. ~ William Gibson,

210:We call it getting a haircut,” Flynne said, giving him a look as she got to her feet, “back in frontier days. ~ William Gibson,

211:When the past is always with you, it may as well be present; and if it is present, it will be future as well. ~ William Gibson,

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

213:I can't imagine writing a book without some strong female characters, unless that was a demand of the setting. ~ William Gibson,

214:I'm away for a while. But there's no cash on the premises, no drugs, and the pitbull's tested positive. Twice. ~ William Gibson,

215:When the past is always with you, it may as well be present; and if it is present, it will be future as well. ~ William Gibson,

216:and still he’d see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void. . . . ~ William Gibson,

217:I only go to Japan when there's someone who can afford to bring me there, and consequently I may never go again! ~ William Gibson,

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

219:The future,” science-fiction writer William Gibson once said, “is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.”21 ~ Joichi Ito,

220:It's the long finger of Big Night, the darkness that feeds the muttering damned to the gentle white maw of Wards. ~ William Gibson,

221:Night City wasn’t there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself. ~ William Gibson,

222:He gestured for it to sit. The bench vibrated briefly in anticipation, shedding drops of rain. The peripheral sat. ~ William Gibson,

223: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,

224:Mary Shelley may well have invented science fiction. I think she did! But after that it seemed to be a boys' game. ~ William Gibson,

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

226:Hitler had had entirely too brilliant a graphics department, and had understood the power of branding all too well. ~ William Gibson,

227:Olhou para trás, quando a porta de plástico se fechou, e viu os olhos dela refletidos numa gaiola de neon vermelho. ~ William Gibson,

228: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,

229:When you want to know how things really work, study them when they’re coming apart. —WILLIAM GIBSON, ZERO HISTORY ~ Michiko Kakutani,

230:Interface evolves toward transparency. The one you have to devote the least conscious effort to, survives, prospers. ~ William Gibson,

231:Otherwise, he'd have found the ruin empty, and then, somehow, very quietly and almost naturally, he would have died. ~ William Gibson,

232:Shit,” she said, small hand gesturing to encompass their situation. “Lots of it. Now. Hitting many fans. Large ones. ~ William Gibson,

233:When the past is always with you, it may as well be present; and if it is present, it will be future as well. Surely ~ William Gibson,

234:But I suppose that is the way of an artiste, no? You needed this world built for you, this beach, this place. To die. ~ William Gibson,

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

236:If you fancy resenting the tedious, I recommend intentional communities, particularly those led by charismatics.” “You ~ William Gibson,

237:People who feel safer with a gun than with guaranteed medical insurance don't yet have a fully adult concept of scary. ~ William Gibson,

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

239:But did it wake, Kumiko wondered, when the alley was empty? Did its laser vision scan the silent fall of midnight snow? ~ William Gibson,

240:Damien maintains, half-seriously, that followers of the footage comprise the first true freemasonry of the new century. ~ William Gibson,

241:Fiction is an illusion wrought with many small, conventionally symbolic marks, triggering visions in the minds of others ~ William Gibson,

242:His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it. ~ William Gibson,

243:The concrete walls were overlaid with graffiti, years of them twisting into a single metascrawl of rage and frustration. ~ William Gibson,

244:but Leon wasn’t due any disability. Wasn’t, their mother said, like he could claim to have caught the dumbfuck there. Not ~ William Gibson,

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

246:I'm not the only one: witness Pokemon! They still keep coming up with this stuff that just rivets us in unexpected areas. ~ William Gibson,

247:the mall crowds swaying like wind-blown grass, a field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies of need and gratification ~ William Gibson,

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

249:You got a watch?” he asked Maelcum. The Zionite shook his locks. “Time be time.” “Jesus,” Case said, and closed his eyes. ~ William Gibson,

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

251:What Shaylene saw as Burton’s primary symptom of traumatic stress, Flynne thought, was his ongoing failure to ask her out. ~ William Gibson,

252:And worse, they'll trample on it, inadvertently crush it, beneath a certain mediocrity inherent in professional competence. ~ William Gibson,

253:Big contrast: While the foreign media are obsessed with Apocalypses, the Japanese people are already talking of rebuilding. ~ William Gibson,

254:Paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer. ~ William Gibson,

255:As William Gibson, who coined the term “cyberspace,” has said: “The future is already here—it is just unevenly distributed. ~ Timothy Ferriss,

256:Stormin’,” he said, like he was glad to note the world outside continuing on any recognizable course at all, however drastic. ~ William Gibson,

257:What we're doing pop culturally is like burning the rain forest. The biodiversity of pop culture is really, really in danger. ~ William Gibson,

258:Heroin", declared Durius Walker, Rydell's colleague in security at the Lucky Dragon on Sunset. "It's the opiate of the masses. ~ William Gibson,

259:Know what ‘collateral damage’ means?” “People get hurt because they happen to be near something that somebody needs to happen? ~ William Gibson,

260:And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face. ~ William Gibson,

261:Friday, August 04, 2006
MONUMENT
posted 8:31 AM

Silver nitrous girls pointed into occult winds of porn and destiny. ~ William Gibson,

262:Her four pupils bored into his, her white face perfectly immobile. “Altruism? What’s happening to you?” “I don’t know,” he said. ~ William Gibson,

263:Now Gentry went to the big display unit, the projection table. “There are worlds within worlds,” he said. “Macrocosm, microcosm. ~ William Gibson,

264:Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt ~ William Gibson,

265:Japan Air’s orbital terminus was a white toroid studded with domes and ringed with the dark-rimmed oval openings of docking bays. ~ William Gibson,

266:William Gibson told only half the story: like the future, the past is also here in the present, and just as unevenly distributed. ~ China Mi ville,

267:a trio of young office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on their wrists, wet pink glittering under the harsh lighting. ~ William Gibson,

268:Laney had recently noticed that the only people who had titles that clearly described their jobs had jobs he wouldn't have wanted. ~ William Gibson,

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

270:The U.S. hundred is the international currency of bad shit, Hollis, and by the same token the number one target of counterfeiters. ~ William Gibson,

271:Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes. ~ William Gibson,

272: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,

273:Not sentient, yet as Lowbeer had pointed out, effortlessly anthropomorphized. An anthropomorph, really, to be disanthropomorphized. ~ William Gibson,

274:Reality television. It merged with politics. Then with performance art.” They walked on. “I think that already happened, back home, ~ William Gibson,

275:The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet. —WILLIAM GIBSON, author of Neuromancer; coined term “cyberspace” in 1984 ~ Timothy Ferriss,

276:How were they weird?” “Hoodoos. Thought the matrix was full of mambos ’n’ shit. Wanna know something, Moll?” “What?” “They’re right. ~ William Gibson,

277:I’m explaining your earlier career to Mr. Laney, Blackwell. I’d only just gotten up to the massage parlor, and now you’ve ruined it. ~ William Gibson,

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

279: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,

280:and the sort of Italian restaurant furniture, in dark welded steel, that might have belonged to any decade of the past hundred years. ~ William Gibson,

281:Another vast omission is my failure to have quietly collapsed the Soviet Union and swept the rubble offstage when nobody was looking. ~ William Gibson,

282:If someone comes in and says, "What are you doing," if I'm honest, the answer is, "I don't know. But I'm doing THIS, don't know why." ~ William Gibson,

283:The machine, the structure, was there, was real. Virek’s money was a sort of universal solvent, dissolving barriers to his will . . . ~ William Gibson,

284:Angie called pause again, rose from the bed, went to the window. She felt an elation, an unexpected sense of strength and inner unity. ~ William Gibson,

285:my way through these small patches of virtual real-estate—or do I somehow imagine that I am performing some more dynamic function? The ~ William Gibson,

286:[The currency of being celebrity] used to be only the elect had any manna in the information society and everyone else was a consumer. ~ William Gibson,

287:The Ono-Sendai; next year’s most expensive Hosaka computer; a Sony monitor; a dozen disks of corporate-grade ice; a Braun coffeemaker. ~ William Gibson,

288: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,

289:It was the root of street cool, too, the knowing posture that implied connection, invisible lines up to the hidden levels of influence. ~ William Gibson,

290:Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes. ~ William Gibson,

291:By day, the bars down Ninsei were shuttered and featureless, the neon dead, the holograms inert, waiting, under the poisoned silver sky. ~ William Gibson,

292:If ignorance were enough to make things not exist, the world would be more like a lot of people think it is. But it's not. And it's not. ~ William Gibson,

293: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,

294: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,

295:It was called dub, a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast libraries of digitalized pop; it was worship, Molly said, and a sense of community. ~ William Gibson,

296: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,

297: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,

298:Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, simply surrounded by assholes. ~ William Gibson,

299: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,

300:My Johnny, see, he was smart, real flash boy. Started out as a stash on Memory Lane, chips in his head and people paid to hide data there. ~ William Gibson,

301:The rain was falling steadily now, but she felt as though she were somehow in collusion with it; it lent the day something conspiratorial, ~ William Gibson,

302:To the very limited extent that I have a political consciousness, to some extent I'm a lazy, apolitical sort of guy that just flits around. ~ William Gibson,

303:He did something with his mouth that approximated a grin. “Bein’ followed, you.” Far off, down in Nighttown, a water vendor cried his trade. ~ William Gibson,

304:stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it. The antique arm whined as he reached for ~ William Gibson,

305:I speak as one who can no longer tolerate that simple state, the cells of my body having opted for the quixotic pursuit of individual careers. ~ William Gibson,

306:I think I'd tell her about the loneliness of being misunderstood. Or is it the loneliness of being afraid to allow ourselves to be understood? ~ William Gibson,

307:Low gray cloud pressing down on the sheer gray city. A glimpse of new buildings, through the scaled-down limo’s tinted, lace-curtained windows. ~ William Gibson,

308:Vodou isn’t like that,” Beauvoir said. “It isn’t concerned with notions of salvation and transcendence. What it’s about is getting things done. ~ William Gibson,

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

310:Sleep takes her down fast, and very deep, whirls her through places too fragmentary to call dreams, then spits her abruptly back to the surface. ~ William Gibson,

311: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,

312: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. ~ William Gibson,

313:unlikely tan on one of Lonny Zone’s whores and the crisp naval uniform of a tall African whose cheekbones were ridged with precise rows of tribal ~ William Gibson,

314:Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. . . . ~ William Gibson,

315:Case turned back, in time to catch the briefest flash of a black rose, its petals sheened like leather, the black stem thorned with bright chrome. ~ William Gibson,

316:let us go somewhere where we can do some genuine, blackguard, poverty-stricken drinking, with no false gingerbread glitter thrown over everything! ~ William Gibson,

317:...era como si Dios revocara la ley de gravedad cuando tienes que cargar una maleta pesada por un corredor de aeropuerto de diez manzanas de largo. ~ William Gibson,

318:For years I have been mourning and not for my dead, it is for this boy for whatever corner in my heart died when his childhood slid out of my arms. ~ William Gibson,

319:That's something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: The most interesting applications turn up on a battlefield, or in a gallery. ~ William Gibson,

320: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,

321: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,

322:Basically they were just assholes, though, and took it as the measure of God’s satisfaction with them that everybody else thought they were assholes. ~ William Gibson,

323:Fads swept the youth of the sprawl at the speed of light; entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly. ~ William Gibson,

324: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. ~ William Gibson,

325:I love science fiction. I always have, ever since I was a kid. I love a lot of science fiction writers. William Gibson is one of my favorite writers. ~ Tahmoh Penikett,

326:Time moves in one direction, memory another. We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting. ~ William Gibson,

327:The bartender’s smile widened. His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it. ~ William Gibson,

328: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,

329:Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. ~ William Gibson,

330:..."Not if I remember to take my pills," he said, as a tangible wave of longing hit him, lust and loneliness riding in on the wavelength of amphetamine. ~ William Gibson,

331: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,

332:Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway. ~ William Gibson,

333:I a warrior. But this no m’ fight, no Zion fight, Babylon fightin’ Babylon, eatin’ i’self, ya know? But Jah seh I an’ I t’ bring Steppin’ Razor outa this. ~ William Gibson,

334:We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the result. Handles. Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves. ~ William Gibson,

335:A sense of the Finn’s presence surrounded him, smell of Cuban cigarettes, smoke locked in musty tweed, old machines given up to the mineral rituals of rust. ~ William Gibson,

336:It seems as though everyone is going to the currency of celebrity. Everyone's getting their own account of whatever that currency is. That's something neat. ~ William Gibson,

337:The dubious niche Case had carved for himself in the criminal ecology of Night City had been cut out with lies, scooped out a night at a time with betrayal. ~ William Gibson,

338: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,

339:And this other evening light, rainy, rose and silver, and to her left a river the color of cold lead. Dark tumble of city, towers in the distance, few lights. ~ William Gibson,

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

341:Spire stood on spire in gleaming ziggurat steps that climbed to a central golden temple tower ringed with the crazy radiator flanges of the Mongo gas stations. ~ William Gibson,

342:Berry,” Pursley said, “you’re in trouble, son. A cop. And an honest one. In trouble. In deep, spectacular, and, please, I have to say this, clearly heroic shit. ~ William Gibson,

343:Bevor man bei Sich eine Depression oder geringes Selbstwertgefühl diagnostiziert...
sollte man sicher gehen, dass man nicht nur von Arschlöchern umgeben ist. ~ William Gibson,

344:Shaylene had big hair without actually having it, Flynne’s mother had once said. Something that came up through any remake, like marker ink through latex paint. ~ William Gibson,

345:It was sometimes best, when you came to the mystery that was art, to come as a child. The child saw things that were too evident, too obvious for the trained eye. ~ William Gibson,

346:Laney felt the pills he'd taken, the ones that were supposed to cushion the jet lag, drop out from under him like some kind of rotten pharmacological scaffolding. ~ William Gibson,

347:Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Dar-
winism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb
permanently on the fast-forward button. ~ William Gibson,

348:burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn’t there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself. ~ William Gibson,

349:I'd always maintained that much of the anarchy and craziness of the early internet had a lot to do with the fact that governments just hadn't realised it was there. ~ William Gibson,

350:I have waited a long time for William Gibson's vision of cyberspace to become real. It became real today for me in that room. – John Biggs East Coast Editor at TechCrunc ~ Anonymous,

351:it’s somehow gone sideways in a puff of what we today would call globalization, to be replaced by some less dangerous combine of large corporations and city-states. ~ William Gibson,

352:And he could still listen to the far-off plaint of a train horn as the express rolled through the night, wailing through a darkness lit solely by moon and fireflies; ~ William Gibson,

353:In Heathrow a vast chunk of memory detached itself from a blank bowl of airport sky and fell on him. He vomited into a blue plastic canister without breaking stride. ~ William Gibson,

354: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, [T5],

355:ego swimming up behind them, to peer at him suspiciously, something eel-like, larval, transparently boned. He had its full attention. “If things had gone differently, ~ William Gibson,

356:He disliked the narrative aspects of history, particularly that part of it. People were so boringly deformed by it, like Ash, or else, like Lev, scarcely aware of it. ~ William Gibson,

357:Something she’d gotten from Burton and the Corps, that you didn’t do things in the clothes you sat around in. You got yourself squared away, then your intent did too. ~ William Gibson,

358:The faces he woke up with in the worlds hotels were like God's own hood ornaments. Women's sleeping faces, identical and alone, naked, aimed straight out to the void. ~ William Gibson,

359:If this were my country,"
Odile said, wrinkling her nose,
"I would not be angry."
"No?" Hollis asked.
"I would drink all the time.
Take pill. Anything. ~ William Gibson,

360:Occasionally if I look back at something I've written I'll find one of those that I don't understand, but that's a bad thing - the unconscious has dealt me a bad hand. ~ William Gibson,

361:You dead awhile there, mon.” “It happens,” he said. “I’m getting used to it.” “You dealin’ wi’ th’ darkness, mon.” “Only game in town, it looks like.” “Jah love, Case, ~ William Gibson,

362:Case gradually became aware of the music that pulsed constantly through the cluster. It was called dub, a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast libraries of digitalized pop; ~ William Gibson,

363:The old man reminded Tito of those ghost-signs, fading high on the windowless sides of blackened buildings, spelling out the names of products made meaningless by time. ~ William Gibson,

364:Because people who couldn’t imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn’t need to imagine, because they already were. ~ William Gibson,

365:I do not think an enormous permanent underclass is a very good thing to have if you're attempting to operate something that at least pretends sometimes to be a democracy. ~ William Gibson,

366: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,

367:You're from the future, Mr Netherton?"
"Not exactly," he said. "I'm in the future that would result from my not being here. But since I am, it isn't your future. Here. ~ William Gibson,

368:All fiction, whether straight or genre, whether literature or Literature, is a personal reinterpretation of its writers’ existence during the time the fiction was written. ~ William Gibson,

369:It will be like watching one of her own dreams on television. Some vast and deeply personal insult to any ordinary notion of interiority.
An experience outside culture. ~ William Gibson,

370:Seated each afternoon in the darkened screening room, Halliday came to recognise the targeted numerals of the Academy leader as sigils preceding the dream state of a film. ~ William Gibson,

371:I had a cigarette,” Case said, looking down at his white-knuckled fist. “I had a cigarette and a girl and a place to sleep. Do you hear me, you son of a bitch? You hear me? ~ William Gibson,

372:I had read and admired Ballard and Burroughs, and I thought of them as very powerful effect pedals. You get to a certain place in the story and you just step on the Ballard. ~ William Gibson,

373:Not that I know of. He had this idea that it was gone, sort of; not gone gone, but gone into everything, the whole matrix. Like it wasn’t in cyberspace anymore, it just was. ~ William Gibson,

374:she's learned it's largely a matter of being willing to ask the next question. She's met the very Mexican who first wore his baseball cap backward, asking the next question. ~ William Gibson,

375:This perpetual toggling between nothing being new, under the sun, and everything having very recently changed, absolutely, is perhaps the central driving tension of my work. ~ William Gibson,

376:Biz here was a constant subliminal hum, and death the accepted punishment for laziness, carelessness, lack of grace, the failure to heed the demands of an intricate protocol. ~ William Gibson,

377:His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass spines. ~ William Gibson,

378:Horror. The spiral birth factory, stepped terraces of the hatching cells, blind jaws of the unborn moving ceaselessly, the staged progress from egg to larva, near-wasp, wasp. ~ William Gibson,

379:I can see television much more easily than I can see features, because the economy and politics of making big, big features seems to me to be narrowing even from what it was. ~ William Gibson,

380:I very seldom compose anything in my head which later finds its way into text, except character names sometimes - I'm often very much inspired by things that I misunderstand. ~ William Gibson,

381:So Hosaka’s built a regular little neurosurgery and staffed it with three hotshots. Two of them are company men, the third’s a Korean who knows black medicine from both ends. ~ William Gibson,

382:Yet what it most nearly resembles, that place where history turns, is the Hole he has posited at the core of his being: an emptiness, as devoid of darkness as it is of light. ~ William Gibson,

383:Freeside is Las Vegas and the hanging gardens of Babylon, an orbital Geneva and home to a family inbred and most carefully refined, the industrial clan of Tessier and Ashpool. ~ William Gibson,

384:the expensive-looking thing in her hand resembled a cross between a miniature oar and an orthopedic brace. She was off for a fast game of something, but Case had no idea what. ~ William Gibson,

385:I felt like a punk who’d gone out to buy a switchblade and come home with a small neutron bomb.

"Screwed again", I thought. "What good’s a neutron bomb in a streetfight? ~ William Gibson,

386:it involved the idea that people who were genuinely dangerous might not need to exhibit the fact at all, and that the ability to conceal a threat made them even more dangerous. ~ William Gibson,

387:She is increasingly of the opinion that worrying about problems doesn't help solve them, but she hasn't really found an alternative yet. Surely you can't just leave them there. ~ William Gibson,

388:You can get in a cab in Vancouver and the 20-year-old driver speaks more knowingly of Michael Ovitz than anyone in the industry. They just know! And it's perhaps not unhealthy. ~ William Gibson,

389: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. ~ William Gibson,

390:A few letter-writers had taken refuge in doorways, their old voiceprinters wrapped in sheets of clear plastic, evidence that the written word still enjoyed a certain prestige here. ~ William Gibson,

391:I'm quite good friends with the putative director, Vincenzo Natali, and I'm a big fan of his work, but beyond that, I don't like to talk about other people's work work-in-progress. ~ William Gibson,

392:But the mind had its own ideas, and Kihn’s opinion of what I was already thinking of as my “sighting” rattled endlessly, through my head in a tight, lopsided orbit. Semiotic ghosts. ~ William Gibson,

393:Heidi’s room looked like the aftermath of a not-very-successful airplane bombing. Something that blew open every suitcase in the luggage compartment without bringing the plane down. ~ William Gibson,

394:drug deficiency.” It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke. The Chatsubo was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there for a week and never hear two words in Japanese. ~ William Gibson,

395:If there were such a being,” she said, “you’d be a part of it, wouldn’t you?” “Yes.” “Would you know?” “Not necessarily.” “Do you know?” “No.” “Do you rule out the possibility?” “No. ~ William Gibson,

396:I'm embarrassed if I think anyone knows exactly what I paid for something, or even where I got it. I want what I'm wearing to feel good on, wear well, and to be extremely functional. ~ William Gibson,

397:I suppose I do the Japanese because I just don't know China. Chinese popular culture has never evoked that instant of, "Whoah! What's that?" that I have with Japanese popular culture. ~ William Gibson,

398:No,” Tessa said, “you’ve got it exactly backwards. People don’t know what they want, not before they see it. Every object of desire is a found object. Traditionally, anyway.” Chevette ~ William Gibson,

399: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,

400:All he could stand,” said Meredith, someone whose intelligence protruded through her beauty, Milgrim felt, like the outline of unforgiving machinery pressing against a taut silk scarf. ~ William Gibson,

401:And then you pushed through into a dim space inhabited by a faintly confusing sense of the half-dozen other bars that had tried and failed in the same room under different managements. ~ William Gibson,

402:Then the snake and the scorpion were gone, and he held a milky plastic syringe in his left hand. “ ‘If God made anything better, he kept it for himself.’ You know the expression, Case? ~ William Gibson,

403:The whole industry wobbles along like a shopping cart with a missing wheel. You can only keep it moving if you lean on it a certain way and keep pushing, but if you stop, it tips over. ~ William Gibson,

404:I feel like I've been very fortunate in that I've stuck like a burr to the dog-leg of the next generation of nerdism. I've been carried into the XXIth century on Bill Gates' pants-cuff. ~ William Gibson,

405:If you knew enough Greek, she thought, you could assemble a word that meant divination via the pattern of grease left on a paper plate by broasted potatoes. But it would be a long word. ~ William Gibson,

406: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. ~ William Gibson,

407:Between the trees, on gentle and too cleverly irregular slopes of sweet green grass, the bright umbrellas shaded the hotel’s guests from the unfaltering radiance of the Lado-Acheson sun. ~ William Gibson,

408:But this feeling had come, that day, and swallowed everything up inside it, so big you couldn’t really prove it was there except by an arithmetic of absence and the memory of better days. ~ William Gibson,

409:El ascensor que me esperaba para llevarme al Cielo podía ser la mejor toma de Hollywood de una caja para momias Bauhaus: un sarcófago angosto, vertical, con una tapa acrílica transparente ~ William Gibson,

410:Rain woke him, a slow drizzle, his feet tangled in coils of discarded fiberoptics. The arcade's sea of sound washed over him, receded, returned. Rolling over, he sat up and held his head. ~ William Gibson,

411:She was sometimes happy, in the sense of being somehow complete, and ready for what another day might bring. And knows she is no longer that, and that while she was, she scarcely knew it. ~ William Gibson,

412:The Internet is part of this ongoing, species-long project we've been working on since we climbed down out of the trees in the savanna. We've been working on it without really knowing it. ~ William Gibson,

413:It had always felt to me as though Washington, D.C., to Boston was one span of stuff. You never really leave Springsteenland, you’re just in this unbroken highway and strip-mall landscape. ~ William Gibson,

414:He could guess the end, the finale. There was an inverted symmetry: Riviera puts the dreamgirl together, the dreamgirl takes him apart. With those hands. Dreamblood soaking the rotten lace. ~ William Gibson,

415:The future, eventually, will find you out. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did. ~ William Gibson,

416:He pulled out into the mirror-image traffic. The rain was running and pooling, tugging reflected neon out of the perpendicular and spreading it in wriggly lines across sidewalk and pavement. ~ William Gibson,

417:Music was strange that way though; there were people into any damned thing, it seemed like, and if you got enough of them together in one bar, she guessed, you could have a pretty good time. ~ William Gibson,

418: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,

419:mechanical watches partake of what my friend John Clute calls the Tamagotchi Gesture. They’re pointless in a peculiarly needful way; they’re comforting precisely because they require tending. ~ William Gibson,

420:Porphyre followed her to the base of the stairs. He’d stayed near her during the meal, as though he sensed her new unease. No, she thought, not new; the old, the always, the now and ever was. ~ William Gibson,

421: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,

422:He feels it as a single indescribable shape, something brailled out for him against a ground or backdrop of he knows not what, and it hurts him, in the poet’s phrase, like the world hurts God. ~ William Gibson,

423: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,

424: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,

425:INTO HER DARKNESS, a churning synaesthesia, where her pain was the taste of old iron, scent of melon, wings of a moth brushing her cheek. She was unconscious, and he was barred from her dreams. ~ William Gibson,

426:Perhaps Legba, the loa Beauvoir credited with almost infinite access to the cyberspace matrix, could alter the flow of data as it was obtained by the scanners, rendering the vévés transparent.… ~ William Gibson,

427: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,

428:She looks after him, feeling a wave of longing, loneliness. Not sexual particularly but to do with the nature of cities, the thousands of strangers you pass in a day, probably never to see again. ~ William Gibson,

429: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,

430:A lot of the buildings [in Toronto] around Yonge and Bloor is the architectural equivalent of Kipper Ties and 8" collar points. It's ghastly and no amount of street-level retail glitz can lift it. ~ William Gibson,

431:Gadgets are usually the last thing I think about, and if there's something new, I'll get to the store for the final shipment of the first generation when it's on sale. So I have last year's stuff. ~ William Gibson,

432:Her head was perfectly still, eyes unblinking. He imagined her ego swimming up behind them, to peer at him suspiciously, something eel-like, larval, transparently boned. He had its full attention. ~ William Gibson,

433:If you believe the journalists, he’s the single wealthiest individual, period. As rich as some zaibatsu. But there’s the catch, really: is he an individual? In the sense that you are, or I am? No. ~ William Gibson,

434:Cognitive bundle,” he said, as the doors opened. She smelled Lev’s cooking from the kitchen. “It constructs essentially meaningless statements out of a given jargon, around whatever chosen topic. I ~ William Gibson,

435:He could have anything in there,” Gentry said, pausing to look down at the unconscious face. He spun on his heel and began his pacing again. “A world. Worlds. Any number of personality-constructs … ~ William Gibson,

436:Conspiracy theory's got to be simple. Sense doesn't come into it. People are more scared of how complicated shit actually is than they ever are about whatever's supposed to be behind the conspiracy. ~ William Gibson,

437:Conspiracy theory’s got to be simple. Sense doesn’t come into it. People are more scared of how complicated shit actually is than they ever are about whatever’s supposed to be behind the conspiracy. ~ William Gibson,

438: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,

439:Conspiracy theory's got to be simple. Sense doesn't come into it. People are more scared of how complicated shit actually is than they ever are about whatever's supposed to be behind the conspiracy. ~ William Gibson,

440:Okay," she said. "What are the nodal points?"
Laney looked at the bubbles on the surface of his beer. "It's like seeing things in clouds," Laney said. "Except the things you see are really there. ~ William Gibson,

441:She's right, Kate's right, I'm right and you're wrong. If you drive her away from here it will be over my dead— chair, has it never occurred to you at on one occasion you might be consummately wrong? ~ William Gibson,

442:I think science fiction gives us a wonderful toolkit to disassemble and reexamine this kind of incomprehensible, constantly changing present that we live in, that we often live in quite uncomfortably. ~ William Gibson,

443:The nature of friendship is such that you never know who will turn out to be your friends, but once you have met them you can’t imagine that you could have gone through life without ever knowing them. ~ William Gibson,

444:Andrea maintained that men like Alain lied so constantly, so passionately, that some basic distinction had been lost. They were artists in their own right, Andrea said, intent on restructuring reality, ~ William Gibson,

445:I find it interesting to see people - mostly people who are younger than I am - going to considerable trouble to try to reproduce things from an era that was far more physical, from a less virtual day. ~ William Gibson,

446:A pair of predatory-looking Christian Scientists were edging toward a trio of young office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on their wrists, wet pink glittering under the harsh lighting. The ~ William Gibson,

447:For some reason, now, she saw the panel in the Roberts, all those faces. Read Us the Book of the Names of the Dead. All the Marlys, she thought all the girls she’d been through the long season of youth. ~ William Gibson,

448: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,

449: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,

450:She’s spoken with Parkaboy twice before, and both times it’s been odd, in the way that initial telephone conversations with people you’ve gotten to know well on the Net, yet have never met, are odd. She ~ William Gibson,

451: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,

452: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,

453:She was big on patination. That was how quality wore in, she said, as opposed to out. Distressing, on the other hand, was the faking of patination, and was actually a way of concealing a lack of quality. ~ William Gibson,

454:The Thirties dreamed white marble and slip-stream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze, but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming. ~ William Gibson,

455:Cliches became cliches for a reason; that they usually hold at least a modicum of truth, and the following cliche is truer than most: You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been. ~ William Gibson,

456: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,

457:of data than of objects, seems a natural crossover figure in today’s interface of British and Japanese cultures. I see it in the eyes of the Portobello dealers, and in the eyes of the Japanese collectors: ~ William Gibson,

458:A part of him knew that the arc of his self-destruction was glaringly obvious to his customers, who grew steadily fewer, but that same part of him basked in the knowledge that it was only a matter of time. ~ William Gibson,

459:She wore loose black silks and black espadrilles. `I'm an exotic. I got a big straw hat for this, too. You, you just wanna look like a cheap-ass hood who's up for what he can get, so the instant tan's okay. ~ William Gibson,

460:What flavor, though? Chinese? Indian? I’m not even convinced it’s offshore. Maybe it starts here, goes out, comes back in.” “I wouldn’t know about that. Company’s Colombian.” “Columbia S.C., for all I know, ~ William Gibson,

461:All we really have when we pretend to write about the future is the moment in which we are writing. That's why every imagined future obsoletes like an ice cream melting on the way back from the corner store. ~ William Gibson,

462:If J.G. Ballard had been on Twitter, I doubt he'd have cat-posted. Wm. S. Burroughs, on the other hand, probably would have. He loved cats. I received Christmas cards from Burroughs. All were cute cat cards. ~ William Gibson,

463:That's one of my favorite things about Twitter: You can tweak your feed into a fabulous novelty engine. That's only one thing you can do with it, but it's one of the things I find most entertaining about it. ~ William Gibson,

464:You could have sex relatively comfortably on a platform of books, but not on a platform of PDA.s. Hardcover books. Paperbacks might start sliding around. Though I.d still prefer paperbacks to a pile of PDA.s. ~ William Gibson,

465:true home of a generation of completely uninhibited technophiles. She was talking about those odds and ends of “futuristic” Thirties and Forties architecture you pass daily in American cities without noticing; ~ William Gibson,

466:Coldiron is concerned about the townspeople not being priced out of chili dogs, but willing to condone dosing religious protesters, however repellant, with something that turns them into homicidal erotomaniacs? ~ William Gibson,

467:She remembers an eerily young Sean Connery, in that first James Bond film, using fine clear Scottish spit to paste one of his gorgeous black hairs across the gap between the jamb and the door of his hotel room. ~ William Gibson,

468:Are you - are you sad?"
- No.
"But your - your songs are sad."
- My songs are of time and distance. The sadness is in you. Watch my arms. There is only the dance. These things you treasure are shells. ~ William Gibson,

469:And the Yak, they can afford to move so fucking slow, man, they’ll wait years and years. Give you a whole life, just so you’ll have more to lose when they come and take it away. Patient like a spider. Zen spiders. ~ William Gibson,

470:Now Sally plunged her abruptly into the full strangeness of this place, with its rot and randomness rooting towers taller than any in Tokyo, corporate obelisks that pierced the sooty lacework of overlapping domes. ~ William Gibson,

471:But he also saw a certain sense in the notion that burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn’t there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself. ~ William Gibson,

472:Her fingers found a random second stud and she was catapulted through the static wall, into cluttered vastness, the notional void of cyberspace, the bright grid of the matrix ranged around her like an infinite cage. ~ William Gibson,

473:Hollis thought he looked like William Burroughs, minus the bohemian substrate (or perhaps the methadone). Like someone who'd be invited quail shooting with the vice-president, though too careful to get himself shot. ~ William Gibson,

474:I’m afraid I don’t know her,” he said, with the slight wince that came when you asked him about music that had come out since his own release. This always made Chia feel sorry for him, which she knew was ridiculous. ~ William Gibson,

475:I'm often saddened and dismayed to see myself portrayed as either a Luddite or as a raving technophile. I've always thought that my job was to be as anthropologically neutral about emerging technologies as possible. ~ William Gibson,

476:Are you—are you sad?” —No. “But your—your songs are sad.” —My songs are of time and distance. The sadness is in you. Watch my arms. There is only the dance. These things you treasure are shells. “I—I knew that. Once. ~ William Gibson,

477:The best thing about having had all that done, aside from getting a new mouth, was that he’d gotten to see a little bit of Basel, going out for the treatments. Otherwise, he’d stayed in the clinic, per his agreement. ~ William Gibson,

478: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,

479:I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, Turing’ll wipe it. Nobody trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead. ~ William Gibson,

480:I think that the collectible ephemera craze/awareness is probably driven by a reverse market, rebounding off the sense of everything being mass-produced. It's the last step you take in trying to find something unique. ~ William Gibson,

481:I knew, somehow, that the city behind me was Tucson—a dream Tucson thrown up out of the collective yearning of an era. That it was real, entirely real. But the couple in front of me lived in it, and they frightened me. ~ William Gibson,

482: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,

483:You saw a double. A hologram perhaps. Many things, Marly, are perpetrated in my name. Aspects of my wealth have become autonomous, by degrees; at times they even war with one another. Rebellion in the fiscal extremities. ~ William Gibson,

484:There was that same sense of being surrounded by the sleeping inhabitants of a waking world he had no interest in visiting or knowing, of dull business temporarily suspended, of futility and repetition soon to wake again. ~ William Gibson,

485: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,

486:I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand. ~ William Gibson,

487:If the content is sufficiently engrossing, however, you don’t need wraparound deep-immersion goggles to shut out the world. You grow your own. You are there. Watching the content you most want to see, you see nothing else. ~ William Gibson,

488:Paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer.
But he was also fond of saying, at other times, that even paranoid schizophrenics have enemies. ~ William Gibson,

489: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,

490:Even if building robots were physically impossible, a super-intelligent and super-wealthy AI could easily pay or manipulate myriad humans to unwittingly do its bidding, as in William Gibson’s science fiction novel Neuromancer. ~ Max Tegmark,

491:Dixie?” “Yeah.” “You ever try to crack an AI?” “Sure. I flatlined. First time. I was larkin’, jacked up real high, out by Rio heavy commerce sector. Big biz, multinationals, Government of Brazil lit up like a Christmas tree. ~ William Gibson,

492:Nighttown, because the Pit’s inverted, and the bottom of its bowl touches the sky, the sky that Nighttown never sees, sweating under its own firmament of acrylic resin, up where the Lo Teks crouch in the dark like gargoyles, ~ William Gibson,

493:I've become convinced that nostalgia is a fundamentally unhealthy modality. When you see it, it's usually attached to something else that's really, seriously bad. I don't traffic in nostalgia. We're becoming a global culture. ~ William Gibson,

494:I was afraid to watch 'Blade Runner' in the theater because I was afraid the movie would be better than what I myself had been able to imagine. In a way, I was right to be afraid, because even the first few minutes were better. ~ William Gibson,

495:Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the result. Handles. Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves. ~ William Gibson,

496:She feels the things she herself owns as a sort of pressure. Other people's objects exert no pressure. Margot thinks that Cayce has weaned herself from materialism, is preternaturally adult, requiring no external tokens of self. ~ William Gibson,

497:Shoats had pushed his chair back from the table to allow himself room for the guitar, between the table edge and his belly, and was tuning it. He wore that hearing-secret-harmonies expression people wore when they tuned guitars. ~ William Gibson,

498:And waking, once again, face smudged into Andrea's couch, the red quilt humped around her shoulders, smelling coffee, while Andrea hummed some Tokyo pop song to herself in the next room, dressing, in a gray morning of Paris rain. ~ William Gibson,

499:Terrorism,” said the rental. “We prefer not to use that term,” said Lowbeer, studying her candle flame with something that looked to Netherton to be regret, “if only because terror should remain the sole prerogative of the state. ~ William Gibson,

500:it seemed that it was changing subtly, cooking itself down under the pressure of time, silent invisible flakes settling to form a mulch, a crystalline essence of discarded technology, flowering secretly in the Sprawl’s waste places. ~ William Gibson,

501:You will come with us. We are at home with situations of legal ambiguity. The treaties under which our arm of the Registry operates grant us a great deal of flexibility. And we create flexibility, in situations where it is required. ~ William Gibson,

502:A week later he was in Tokyo, his face reflected in an elevator’s gold-veined mirror for this three-floor ascent of the aggressively nondescript O My Golly Building. To be admitted to Death Cube K, apparently a Franz Kafka theme bar. ~ William Gibson,

503:Nice bra.” “Israeli,” said Heidi. She looked around, taking in the contents of the room. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “The wallpaper’s like Hendrix’s pants.” “I think it’s satin.” Vertically striped, in green, burgundy, ecru, and black. ~ William Gibson,

504: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,

505:As I luxuriate in the discovery that I am no special sponge for sorrow, but merely another fallible animal in this stone maze of a city, I come simultaneously to see that I am the focus of some vast device fueled by an obscure desire. ~ William Gibson,

506:Terrorism,” said the rental. “We prefer not to use that term,” said Lowbeer, studying her candle flame with something that looked to Netherton to be regret, “if only because terror should remain the sole prerogative of the state.” She ~ William Gibson,

507:Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the result. Handles. Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves.” “I’ve ~ William Gibson,

508: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,

509: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,

510:All my life I've encountered people who were obsessed with one particular class of object or experience, who were constantly pursuing that thing. Since I was a little kid, I hadn't afforded myself the opportunity, I guess, to have a hobby. ~ William Gibson,

511:It was such an easy thing, death. He saw that now: It just happened. You screwed up by a fraction and there it was, something chill and odorless, ballooning out from the four stupid corners of the room, your mother’s Barrytown living room. ~ William Gibson,

512:And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiled in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like a film compiled of random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information. ~ William Gibson,

513:Architectural photography can involve a lot of waiting; the building becomes a kind of sundial, while you wait for a shadow to crawl away from a detail you want, or for the mass and balance of the structure to reveal itself in a certain way. ~ William Gibson,

514:I assume that - because you can get degrees in journalism from very reputable universities - I assume that people can be trained to be journalists. I've never been entirely certain that anyone can be trained to be a novelist in the same way. ~ William Gibson,

515:I'm quite proud of what I anticipated about reality television from my books in the early '90s, which I based on the early seasons of 'Cops' and on the amazing stuff I had read about happening on Japanese shows and the British 'Big Brother'. ~ William Gibson,

516:There was a brass plate mounted on the door at eye level, so old that the lettering that had once been engraved there had been reduced to a spidery, unreadable code, the name of some long dead function or functionary, polished into oblivion. ~ William Gibson,

517:Understanding otaku-hood, I think, is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the Web. There is something profoundly postnational about it, extra-geographic. We are all curators, in the postmodern world, whether we want to be or not. ~ William Gibson,

518:History had already done the really messy work, when Wintermute found him, sifting him out of all of the war’s ripe detritus, gliding into the man’s flat gray field of consciousness like a water spider crossing the face of some stagnant pool, ~ William Gibson,

519:‎Now the deer moved through snow, snow that blew sideways, frosting the perfectly upright walls of Detroit's dead and monumental heart, vast black tines of brick reaching up to vanish in the white sky.
They made a lot of nature shows there. ~ William Gibson,

520:She [Cayce Pollard] feels the things she herself owns as a sort of pressure. Other people’s objects exert no pressure. Margot thinks that Cayce has weaned herself from materialism, is preternaturally adult, requiring no external tokens of self. ~ William Gibson,

521:Singaporeans seemed generally quite loathe to discuss these more intimate policies of government with a curious foreign visitor who was more than twice as tall as the average human, and who sweated slowly but continuously, like and aged cheese. ~ William Gibson,

522:Why were these giant projects so relatively common in Europe? He’d grown up with the unquestioned assumption that America was the home of heroic infrastructure, but was it, now? He didn’t think so. How did they pay for these things here? Taxes? ~ William Gibson,

523: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,

524:She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers lightly spread, and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four-centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails.
She smiled. The blades slowly withdrew. ~ William Gibson,

525:People say Americans are materialistic. But do you know why?” “Why?” asked Milgrim, more concerned with this uncharacteristically expansive mode of expression on Brown’s part. “Because they have better stuff,” Brown had replied. “No other reason. ~ William Gibson,

526:Television has - particularly at the HBO level in the United States - become a completely new genre. Something like Deadwood or The Wire is a whole new thing - there was no equivalent to that medium before. It's like a new way of telling stories. ~ William Gibson,

527:There are no backwaters where things can breed—our connectivity is so high and so global that there are no more Seattles and no more Haight-Ashburys. We’ve arrived at a level of commodification that may have negated the concept of counterculture. ~ William Gibson,

528:To call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed that, once, but now it is real in another way. You know that, Case. Your business is to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names the owners seek to conceal. True names . . . ~ William Gibson,

529:Lady,' Rydell said carefully, 'I think you're crazier than a sack full of assholes.'
Her eyebrows shot up. 'There,' she said.
'There what?'
'Color, Mr. Rydell. Fire. The brooding verbal polychromes of an almost unthinkably advanced decay. ~ William Gibson,

530:He woke with the impression of light fading, but the room was dark. Afterimages, retinal flares. The sky outside hinted at the start of a recorded dawn. There were no voices now, only the rush of water, far down the face of the Intercontinental. In ~ William Gibson,

531: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,

532: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,

533:Not hungry,’ Case managed. His brain was deep-fried. No, he decided, it had been thrown into hot fat and left there, and the fat had cooled, a thick dull grease congealing on the wrinkled lobes, shot through with greenish-purple flashes of pain. ‘You ~ William Gibson,

534:I watch for emergent technologies and pay attention to what people say they'll be good for, then see what we actually use them for. It never occurred to me that a tiny telephone with a wireless transceiver would do whatever it is that it's done to us. ~ William Gibson,

535:his face expressionless, the tip of his cane planted neatly on the sidewalk and his large hands one atop the other on the brass knob. “First thing that you learn,” he said, with the tone of a man reciting a proverb, “is that you always gotta wait . . . ~ William Gibson,

536:Until I was 16, I read nothing but science fiction. I loved William Gibson and I still do. But my favourite book when I was growing up, for a long time, was 'Snow Crash' by Neal Stephenson, which I must have read about a dozen times when I was a teenager. ~ Ned Beauman,

537:Beyond ego, beyond personality, beyond awareness, he moved, Kuang moving with him, evading his attackers with an ancient dance, Hideo’s dance, grace of the mind-body interface granted him, in that second, by the clarity and singleness of his wish to die. ~ William Gibson,

538:We don't legislate emergent technologies into existence. We almost never do. They just emerge, dragged forth by Adam Smith's invisible hand. Then we have to see what people are actually going to do with them, and try to legislate to take account of that. ~ William Gibson,

539: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,

540:He’s quite horrible, Virek, I think . . .” Marly hesitated. “Quite likely,” Andrea said, taking another sip of coffee. “Do you expect anyone that wealthy to be a nice, normal sort?” “I felt, at one point, that he wasn’t quite human. Felt that very strongly. ~ William Gibson,

541:If I meet someone and discover that they're an absolute, very earnest nationalist, it's unlikely that I'm going to get much closer to them. I don't understand them. It doesn't matter where they're from, I just don't get it. I'm a multi-national kind of guy. ~ William Gibson,

542:The pop star, as we knew her" – and here he bowed slightly, in her direction – "was actually an artefact of preubiquitous media."
"Of -?"
"Of a state in which 'mass' media existed, if you will, within the world."
"As opposed to?"
"Comprising it. ~ William Gibson,

543:But, Hubertus," Cayce offers, "what if Dorothea is..."
"Yes?" He leans forward, palms flat on the table.
"A vicious lying cunt?"
Bigend giggles, a deeply alarming sound. "Well," he says, "we are in the business of advertising, after all." He smiles. ~ William Gibson,

544:I would like to design what people generally call streetwear. I'd like to dress skateboarders, or whatever the older equivalent of skateboarders are. I pay more attention to that stuff than anyone would ever imagine because I'm watching what the designers do. ~ William Gibson,

545:To call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed that, once, but now it is real in another way. You know that, Case. Your business is to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names the owners seek to conceal. True names...
~ William Gibson, Neuromancer,

546:A policewoman, State, in a white paper hazmat suit, half unzipped, was standing in the middle of Porter, eating a pulled-pork sandwich. Flynne liked her haircut. Wondered if Tommy did. Then she wondered where you got a pulled-pork sandwich, this time of night. ~ William Gibson,

547:My dream scenario would be that you could go into a bookshop, examine copies of every book in print that they're able to offer, then for a fee have them produce in a minute or two a beautiful finished copy in a dust jacket that you would pay for and take home. ~ William Gibson,

548:Netherton was watching the intricate texture of her bustier, which resembled a microminiature model of some Victorian cast-iron station roof, its countless tiny panes filmed as by the coal smoke of fingerling locomotives, yet flexing as she breathed and spoke. ~ William Gibson,

549:They seem to have accepted that she’s gone.” “I don’t see how they could be sure she is. But I wish we’d known. Could’ve brought some flowers.” “Daedra never suggested this. It seems to be a surprise.” “A surprise funeral? You do that, here?” “A first, for me. ~ William Gibson,

550: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,

551:Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. ~ William Gibson,

552:ancient television and withdrew a silver-black vacuum tube. “See this? Part of my DNA, sort of. . . .” He tossed the thing into the shadows and Case heard it pop and tinkle. “You’re always building models. Stone circles. Cathedrals. Pipe-organs. Adding machines. ~ William Gibson,

553:Between stations there was a gray shudder beyond the windows of the silent train. Not as of surfaces rushing past, but as if particulate matter were being vibrated there at some crucial rate, just prior to the emergence of a new order of being. Chia and Masahiko ~ William Gibson,

554:I did not come to this country for the terror from paramilitary," declared Voytek, hoarsely. "I did not come to this country for motherfucker. But motherfucker is waiting. Always. Is carceral state, surveillance state. Orwell. You have read Orwell? ~ William Gibson,

555:Never hurt me. . . .” The voice was her own, lost and amazed, the voice of a child, and suddenly she was free, free of need, desire, free of fear, and all that she felt for the handsome face across the table was simple revulsion, and she could only stare at him, ~ William Gibson,

556:ancient television and withdrew a silver-black vacuum tube. “See this? Part of my DNA, sort of. .��. .” He tossed the thing into the shadows and Case heard it pop and tinkle. “You’re always building models. Stone circles. Cathedrals. Pipe-organs. Adding machines. ~ William Gibson,

557:But already he knows that his conscience will never allow him to divest this lost soul of this watch, and the knowledge hurts him. Fontaine has been trying all his life to cultivate dishonesty, what his father called “sharp practices,” and he invariably fails. The ~ William Gibson,

558: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,

559:The big news in biology this week was the announcement that we’ve stopped evolving, in the biological sense. I’ll buy that. Technology has stopped us, and technology will take us on, into a new evolution, one Mr. Bush never dreamed of, and neither, I’m sure, have I. ~ William Gibson,

560:Things were launching themselves from the ornate sunburst spires, glittering leech shapes made of shifting planes of light. There were hundreds of them, rising in a whirl, their movements random as windblown paper down dawn streets. “Glitch systems,” the voice said. ~ William Gibson,

561: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,

562:I grew up in southwestern Virginia. I was born in South Carolina, but only because my parents had a vacation cabin or something there on the beach. I was like a summer baby. But I did grow up in the South. I grew up in serious, serious Appalachia, in a very small town. ~ William Gibson,

563:This is without subtlety,” he said, as if to himself. His voice was cool and pleasant. His every move was part of a dance, a dance that never ended, even when his body was still, at rest, but for all the power it suggested, there was also a humility, an open simplicity. ~ William Gibson,

564:It belonged, he knew—he remembered—as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read. ~ William Gibson,

565:Yeah, it's so popular it's almost legal. The customers are torn between needing someone and wanting to be alone at the same time, which has probably always been the name of that particular game, even before we had the neuroelectronics to enable them to have it both ways. ~ William Gibson,

566:Change is happening and old structures are falling in the form of a "Death of a Thousand Cuts." In other words one grand act is not occuring but a multitude of small expressions on the part of individuals, both slowly and swiftly taking the place of heirarchy and history. ~ William Gibson,

567: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,

568:He’d missed the first wasp, when it built its paperfine gray house on the blistered paint of the windowframe, but soon the nest was a fist-sized lump of fiber, insects hurtling out to hunt the alley below like miniature copters buzzing the rotting contents of the dumpsters. ~ William Gibson,

569:Acceptance. Acceptance of the impermanence of being. And acceptance of the imperfect nature of being, or possibly the perfect nature of being, depending on how one looks at it. Acceptance that this is not a rehearsal. That this is it.
(When asked what will save humanity.) ~ William Gibson,

570: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,

571:Now that is the real thing, the straight goods from the mass unconscious, friend; that little girl is a witch. There’s just no place for her to function in this society. She’d have seen the devil, if she hadn’t been brought up on The Bionic Man and all those Star Trek reruns. ~ William Gibson,

572:So now, in her day, he said, they were headed into androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad shit, like she sort of already knew, figured everybody did, except for people who still said it wasn’t happening, and those people were mostly expecting the Second Coming anyway. ~ William Gibson,

573:London,” Bobby said. “She had to trade me this to get the serious voodoo shit. Thought they wouldn’t have anything to do with her. Fuck of a lot of good it did her. They’ve been fading, sort of blurring. You can still raise em, sometimes, but their personalities run together.… ~ William Gibson,

574:nation,” he heard himself say, “consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual’s morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation’s laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn’t a nation. ~ William Gibson,

575:So now, in her day, he said, they were headed into androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad shit, like she sort of already knew, figured everybody did, except for people who still said it wasn't happening, and those people were mostly expecting the Second Coming, anyway. ~ William Gibson,

576:A part of that [timewrap] for me was growing up in a culture that violence had always been a part of. It wasn't an aberration, though I realize that in retrospect. I grew up in the part of the U.S. where all of Cormac McCarthy's novels are set and that's a pretty violent place. ~ William Gibson,

577:A nation,” he heard himself say, “consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual’s morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation’s laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn’t a nation. ~ William Gibson,

578:His toes were making little squelching noises, each time he took a step, and what if the last thing you knew before you died was just some pathetic discomfort like that, like your shoes were soaked and your socks were wet, and you weren’t ever going to get to change them? Rydell ~ William Gibson,

579:That evil wasn’t glamorous, but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room, however that might happen, to become its bigger self. Bigger, with more horrible results, but never more than the cumulative weight of ordinary human baseness. ~ William Gibson,

580:The men in bars, who explain every dark secret of this world, Tito, have you noticed, no secret requires more than three drinks to explain. Who killed the Kennedys? Three drinks. America’s real motive in Iraq? Three drinks. The three-drink answers can never contain the truth. The ~ William Gibson,

581:Cyberspace is colonising what we used to think of as the real world. I think that our grandchildren will probably regard the distinction we make between what we call the real world and what they think of as simply the world as the quaintest and most incomprehensible thing about us. ~ William Gibson,

582:the crashing of the games, his heart hammering. When the fear came, it was like some half-forgotten friend. Not the cold, rapid mechanism of the dex-paranoia, but simple animal fear. He’d lived for so long on a constant edge of anxiety that he’d almost forgotten what real fear was. ~ William Gibson,

583:They had remained silent during the trial, their leader stating only that the disease was God’s vengeance on sinners and the unclean. Lean men with shaven heads and blank, implacable eyes, they were God’s gunmen, and would stare, as such, from all the tapes of history, forever. But ~ William Gibson,

584:Cyberspace is colonising what we used to think of as the real world. I think that our grandchildren will probably regard the distinction we make between what we call the real world and what they think of as simply the world as the quaintest and most incomprehensible thing about us. ~ William Gibson,

585:How it was, when you lost things, it was like you only knew for the first time that you'd ever had them. (...) You didn't wake up every morning and say yes and yes to every little thing. But little things were what it was all made of. Or just somebody to see, there, when you woke up. ~ William Gibson,

586:Part of the core of my system, is a way of trying to give the characters more control. If I'm practicing making up what the characters will do, it's never good. In fact, when I catch myself doing that, I try to get rid of that section, and try and let them start making the decisions. ~ William Gibson,

587:We're an information economy. They teach you that in school. What they don't tell you is that it's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified... ~ William Gibson,

588:She hung up before he could say goodbye. Stood there with her arm cocked, phone at ear-level, suddenly aware of the iconic nature of her unconscious pose. Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places, that had once belong to cigarettes, now belonged to phones. ~ William Gibson,

589: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,

590:How could she have imagined that it would be possible to live, to move, in the unnatural field of Virek’s wealth without suffering distortion? Virek had taken her up, in all her misery, and had rotated her through the monstrous, invisible stresses of his money, and she had been changed. ~ William Gibson,

591: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,

592:Identify yourself, please.” Lucky Dragon ATMs all had this same voice, a weird, uptight, strangled little castrato voice, and he wondered why that was. But you could be sure they’d worked it out: probably it kept people from standing around, bullshitting with the machine. But Rydell knew ~ William Gibson,

593:I've tended to find that myths of the near future give people the ability to really kind of explore the present, so say for example if look at William Gibson and his book Neuromancer or if you look at J.G. Ballard or Samuel Delaney those are probably three of my favorite writers in that genre. ~ DJ Spooky,

594:Jimmy laughed. The thing was a computer terminal, he said. It could talk. And not in a synth-voice, but with a beautiful arrangement of gears and miniature organ pipes. It was a baroque thing for anyone to have constructed, a perverse thing, because synth-voice chips cost next to nothing. ~ William Gibson,

595:You are a philosopher.” “I’m a tool, Paco. I’m the most recent tip for a very old machine in the hands of a very old man, who wishes to penetrate something and has so far failed to do so. Your employer fumbles through a thousand tools and somehow chooses me . . .” “You are a poet as well! ~ William Gibson,

596:As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair. ~ William Gibson,

597:As William Gibson says, the future is already here but it's lumpy. It's unevenly distributed. Some people are already living this, the ones on low-lying islands off the coast of India are being swept away, you know, it's already happening to some people. We happen to be very lucky so far. ~ Margaret Atwood,

598: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,

599: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,

600: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,

601:Laney had recently noticed that the only people who had titles that clearly described their jobs had jobs he wouldn’t have wanted. If people asked him what he did, he said he was a quantitative analyst. He didn’t try to explain the nodal points, or Kathy Torrance’s theories about celebrity. ~ William Gibson,

602:And Bobby was working on a new theory of personal deportment; he didn’t quite have the whole thing yet, but part of it involved the idea that people who were genuinely dangerous might not need to exhibit the fact at all, and that the ability to conceal a threat made them even more dangerous. ~ William Gibson,

603:And then she hears the sound of a helicopter, from somewhere behind her and, turning, sees the long white beam of light sweeping the dead ground as it comes, like a lighthouse gone mad from loneliness, and searching that barren ground as foolishly, as randomly, as any grieving heart ever has. ~ William Gibson,

604:A woman’s hand lay on the mattress now, palm up, the white fingers pale. Riviera leaned forward, picked up the hand, and began to stroke it gently. The fingers moved. Riviera raised the hand to his mouth and began to lick the tips of the fingers. The nails were coated with a burgundy lacquer. ~ William Gibson,

605:Their aesthetic, if you haven’t noticed, is about benign skin cancers, supernumerary nipples. Conventional tattoos belong firmly among the iconics of the hegemon. It’s like wearing your cock ring to meet the pope, and making sure he sees it. Actually, it’s worse than that. What are they like? ~ William Gibson,

606:'Cyberspace' as a term is sort of over. It's over in the way that, after a certain time, people stopped using the suffix '-electro' to make things cool, because everything was electrical. 'Electro' was all over the early 20th century, and now it's gone. I think 'cyber' is sort of the same way. ~ William Gibson,

607:The box was nearly finished now, she thought, although it moved so quickly, in the padded claws, that it was difficult to see... Abruptly, it floated free, tumbling end over end, and she sprang for it instinctively, caught it, and went tumbling past the flashing arms, her treasure in her arms. ~ William Gibson,

608:[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,

609:If you make something, it's an artifact. It's something that somebody or some corporate entity has caused to come into being. A great many human beings have thought about each of the artifacts that surround us. Different degrees of intelligence and attention have been brought to bear on anything. ~ William Gibson,

610:It took a month for the gestalt of drugs and tension he moved through to turn those perpetually startled eyes into wells of reflexive need. He’d watched her personality fragment, calving like an iceberg, splinters drifting away, and finally he’d seen the raw need, the hungry armature of addiction. ~ William Gibson,

611:A prophet. A shaman. Motivated extraordinarily, thus extraordinarily motivating. Taking the same drugs they took, which he himself provided. Though of course he didn’t actually take them. If you fancy resenting the tedious, I recommend intentional communities, particularly those led by charismatics. ~ William Gibson,

612:She wondered how powerful money could actually be, if one had enough of it, really enough. She supposed that only the Vireks of the world could really know, and very likely they were functionally incapable of knowing; asking Virek would be like interrogating a fish in order to learn more about water. ~ William Gibson,

613:Tokyu Hands assumes that the customer is very serious about something. If that happens to be shining a pair of shoes, and the customer is sufficiently serious about it, he or she may need the very best German sole-edge enamel available—for the museum-grade weekly restoration of the sides of the soles. ~ William Gibson,

614:...I knew he used women as counters in a game, Bobby Quine versus time and the night of cities. And Rikki had turned up just when he needed something to get him going, something to aim for. So he'd set her up as a symbol for everything he wanted and couldn't have, everything he'd had and couldn't keep. ~ William Gibson,

615:And now it's late, close to the wolfing hour of soul-lack. But she knows, lying curled here, behind him, in the darkness of this small room, with the somehow liquid background sounds of Paris, that hers has returned, at least for the meantime, reeled entirely in on its silver thread and warmly socketed. ~ William Gibson,

616:Bugis Street, once famous for its transvestite prostitutes - the sort of place where one could have imagined Noel Coward, ripped on opium, cocaine and the local tailoring, just off his rickshaw for a night of high buggery - had, when it proved difficult to suppress, a subway station dropped on top of it. ~ William Gibson,

617:Slick stayed where he was, looking up at Gentry’s pale eyes, gray in this light, his taut face. Why did he put up with Gentry anyway? Because you needed somebody, in the Solitude. Not just for electricity; that whole landlord routine was really just a shuck. He guessed because you needed somebody around. ~ William Gibson,

618:Pretty soon the crash would come on, and before then she’d have to figure out a way to get back to the hotel, and suddenly it seemed like everything was too complicated, too many things to do, angles to figure, and that was the crash, when you had to start worrying about putting the day side together again. ~ William Gibson,

619:I probably had something to do with being southern. For some reason, over the last few years I've been much more conscious of that. It's probably because my friend Jack Womack has a thesis that he and I write the way we do because we're southern and we experienced the very tail end of the premeditated south. ~ William Gibson,

620:The Fanta has a nasty, synthetic edge. She wonders why she bought it. The tabloid doesn’t go down any better, seemingly composed in equal measure of shame and rage, as though some inflamed national subtext were being ritually, painfully massaged, for whatever temporary and paradoxical relief this might afford. ~ William Gibson,

621:I guess Twitter is the first thing that has been attractive to me as social media. I never felt the least draw to Facebook or MySpace. I've been involved anonymously in some tiny listservs, mainly in my ceaseless quest for random novelty, and sometimes while doing something that more closely resembles research. ~ William Gibson,

622:Now Gentry went to the big display unit, the projection table. “There are worlds within worlds,” he said. “Macrocosm, microcosm. We carried an entire universe across a bridge tonight, and that which is above is like that below.… It was obvious, of course, that such things must exist, but I’d not dared to hope.… ~ William Gibson,

623:In effect, I grew up in a sort of timewarp, a place where times are scrambled up. There are elements of my childhood that look to me now, in memory more like the 1940s or the 1950s than the 1960s. Jack [Womack] says that that made us science fiction writers, because we grew up experiencing a kind of time travel. ~ William Gibson,

624:They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin. Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours. The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective. For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. ~ William Gibson,

625:it began to be noted that the Wig had gone over the edge. Specifically, the Finn said, the Wig had become convinced that God lived in cyberspace, or perhaps that cyberspace was God, or some new manifestation of same. The Wig’s ventures into theology tended to be marked by major paradigm shifts, true leaps of faith. ~ William Gibson,

626: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,

627:Lev’s entranceway was cluttered with parenting equipment. Miniature Wellingtons, coatrack clumped with bright rainwear, a push-bike reminding Netherton of the patchers, things to hit balls with, many balls themselves. A few stray bits of Lego edged fitfully about among lower strata, like bright rectilinear beetles. ~ William Gibson,

628:That’s what money will buy you, in America,” Brown had said, firmly. “People say Americans are materialistic. But do you know why?” “Why?” asked Milgrim, more concerned with this uncharacteristically expansive mode of expression on Brown’s part. “Because they have better stuff,” Brown had replied. “No other reason. ~ William Gibson,

629:They’d started out as a church, or in a church, not liking anyone being gay or getting abortions or using birth control. Protesting military funerals, which was a thing. Basically they were just assholes, though, and took it as the measure of God’s satisfaction with them that everybody else thought they were assholes. ~ William Gibson,

630: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,

631:Something he’d found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew – he remembered – as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read. ~ William Gibson,

632:I don't generate a storyline and then fill it out in the course of writing. The story actually generates in the course of the writing. It's one of the reasons I've never been comfortable doing screenplays, because in order to get the contract for the screenplay, you have to sit down and tell them what's going to happen. ~ William Gibson,

633:She was talking about those odds and ends of “futuristic” Thirties and Forties architecture you pass daily in American cities without noticing; the movie marquees ribbed to radiate some mysterious energy, the dime stores faced with fluted aluminum, the chrome-tube chairs gathering dust in the lobbies of transient hotels. ~ William Gibson,

634:The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

"It's not like I'm using," Case heard someone say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the Chat. "It's like my body's developed this massive drug defi-
ciency."

It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke. ~ William Gibson,

635:THROUGH THIS EVENING’S tide of faces unregistered, unrecognized, amid hurrying black shoes, furled umbrellas, the crowd descending like a single organism into the station’s airless heart, comes Shinya Yamazaki, his notebook clasped beneath his arm like the egg case of some modest but moderately successful marine species. ~ William Gibson,

636:Unstuck her in time, day-sleeping in her bedroom. How old was she? Seven, seventeen, twenty-seven? Dusk or dawn? Couldn’t tell by the light outside. Checked her phone. Evening. The house silent, her mother probably asleep. Out through the smell of her grandfather’s fifty years of National Geographic, shelved in the hall. ~ William Gibson,

637:You could buy a burrito there, a lottery ticket, batteries, tests for various diseases. You could do voice-mail, e-mail, send faxes. It had occurred to Laney that this was probably the only store for miles that sold anything that anyone ever really needed; the others all sold things that he couldn’t even imagine wanting. ~ William Gibson,

638:"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,

639: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,

640:Because people who couldn’t imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn’t need to imagine, because they already were. She’d said it was always a mistake, to believe those people were different, special, infected with something that was inhuman, subhuman, fundamentally other. ~ William Gibson,

641:Hollis blew gently on the thin tan island of foam afloat in her half pint of Guinness, to see it move, then drank some. Always a mysterious beverage to her. Unsure why she’d asked for it. She liked the way it looked more than how it tasted. How would it taste, she wondered, if it tasted the way she thought it looked? No idea. ~ William Gibson,

642:I personally recall that world, which you can only imagine was preferable to this one,' she said. 'Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the result. Handles. Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves. ~ William Gibson,

643: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,

644:The use of explosives is unusual, and we prefer to keep it so. Too much like asymmetric warfare.” “Terrorism,” said the rental. “We prefer not to use that term,” said Lowbeer, studying her candle flame with something that looked to Netherton to be regret, “if only because terror should remain the sole prerogative of the state. ~ William Gibson,

645:The stranger’s hand emerged, holding something that looked to Chia like a very large pair of chromeplated scissors, but then unfolded, with a series of small sharp clicks, and apparently of its own accord, into a kind of glittering, skeletal axe, its leading edge hawklike and lethal, the head behind it tapering like an icepick. ~ William Gibson,

646:You just had to know how to do it, and when to do it, and most important of all, why to do it. Powerful substance like this, Lowell would explain, it wasn't there just for any casual jack-off recreational urge. It was there to allow you to do things. To empower you, he said, so you could do things and, best of all, finish them. ~ William Gibson,

647:I think the large part of the function of the Internet is it is archival. It's unreliable to the extent that word on the street is unreliable. It's no more unreliable than that. You can find the truth on the street if you work at it. I don't think of the Internet or the virtual as being inherently inferior to the so-called real. ~ William Gibson,

648:Sometimes, at dawn, perched on the edge of his unmade bed, drifting into sleep—he never slept lying down, now—he thought about her. Antoinette. And them. The belonging kind. Sometimes he speculated dreamily. . . . Perhaps they were like house mice, the sort of small animal evolved to live only in the walls of man-made structures. ~ William Gibson,

649:I like the idea of people who've had some success in one form secretly wanting to be something else; I have some of that myself. I look for it in other people who've established themselves in some particular art form, and then you find out that they really would like to design running shoes, or edit literary magazines or something. ~ William Gibson,

650:A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my own career want list. That label enabled mainstream science fiction to safely assimilate our dissident influence, such as it was. Cyberpunk could then be embraced and given prizes and patted on the head, and genre science fiction could continue unchanged. ~ William Gibson,

651:But perhaps, she thinks, this isn’t a Russian meal. Perhaps it’s a meal in that country without borders that Bigend strives to hail from, a meal in a world where there are no mirrors to find yourself on the other side of, all experience having been reduced, by the spectral hand of marketing, to price-point variations on the same thing. ~ William Gibson,

652:I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity. Its record for being accurately predictive is really, really poor! If you look at the whole history of science fiction, what people have said is going to happen, what writers have said is going to happen, and what actually happened - it's terrible. ~ William Gibson,

653:The factory might have given us the millionfold productivity increases that yielded the Industrial Revolution, but it achieved those gains by chaining us to machines, deskilling the artisan and turning him into a cog in the factory, stripped of judgment and dignity and disconnected from the rhythms of his spirit and the world around him. ~ William Gibson,

654: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,

655:The ecological impact of book manufacture and traditional book marketing - I think that should really be considered. We have this industry in which we cut down trees to make the paper that we then use enormous amounts of electricity to turn into books that weigh a great deal and are then shipped enormous distances to point-of-sale retail. ~ William Gibson,

656:Ain’t all that simple,” he said. “It’s everything I been brought up to be. Can’t all be bullshit, can it?” Rydell, glancing over at him, took pity. “Naw,” he said, “I guess it wouldn’t have to be, necessarily, all of it, but it’s just—” “What they bring you all up to be, Berry?” Rydell had to think about it. “Republican,” he said, finally. ~ William Gibson,

657:I have often raised an eyebrow at hearing him sing, as I push a cart down some Safeway aisle, of the spiritual complexities induced by he admixture of Cuervo Gold, cocaine, and nineteen-year-old girls (in the hands of a man of, shall we say, a certain age). At which point I look around Frozen Foods and wonder: "Is anyone else hearing this? ~ William Gibson,

658:There's an idea called "gray man", in the security business, that I find interesting. They teach people to dress unobtrusively. Chinos instead of combat pants, and if you really need the extra pockets, a better design conceals them. They assume, actually, that the bad guys will shoot all the guys wearing combat pants first, just to be sure. ~ William Gibson,

659:Movies have gotten dull, the way network television got dull. And television, if we can still even call it that, is still really exciting and riveting and people are totally into it. I am always meeting people who have these favorite shows that they are completely wired too and not only have I never seen it but I don't even know how to find it. ~ William Gibson,

660:The culture is still there, and people are still doing it. I imagine some people are doing it very well indeed. As for me, it definitely was my native literary culture. Science fiction was where I'm from, but on the way to now, I went through a lot of other territory, and I wasn't really that culturally conventional an SF writer when I started. ~ William Gibson,

661:professional expatriates; you could drink there for a week and never hear two words in Japanese. Ratz was tending bar, his prosthetic arm jerking monotonously as he filled a tray of glasses with draft Kirin. He saw Case and smiled, his teeth a webwork of East European steel and brown decay. Case found a place at the bar, between the unlikely tan ~ William Gibson,

662:They both knew she knew this was bullshit, but she guessed that was the way it went, when somebody you knew killed some people and you didn't want them to get caught for it. They were teaching her the story as it needed to be told, and telling it to her in a way that wouldn't require her to tell anything but the truth about what they'd told her. ~ William Gibson,

663:The portraits were monochrome photographs of men in dark suits and ties, four very sober gentlemen whose lapels were decorated with small metal emblems of the kind her father sometimes wore. Though her mother had told her that the cubes contained ghosts, the ghosts of her father’s evil ancestors, Kumiko found them more fascinating than frightening. ~ William Gibson,

664:On the final day of 1999, an immaculately suited Jesus and a Bukowskiesque Devil warily circle each other through a series of sleazy bars and chilly law offices, trying to cut a deal that centers on Christ’s PowerBook. This contains the biblical Seventh Seal: Unlock the file and the Judgment Day program will launch, and then all hell will break loose. ~ William Gibson,

665:[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,

666: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. But I was very careful to bury them deeply, deeply in the plaster and paint over them. I didn't want anybody to directly access them, and that's gradually changed for me. ~ William Gibson,

667:Olga came home, but she never came back to life behind those blue eyes. They tried, of course, but the more they tried, the more tenuous she became, and, in their hunger to know, they spread her thinner and thinner until she came, in her martyrdom, to fill whole libraries with frozen aisles of precious relics. No saint was ever pared so fine. (Hinterlands) ~ William Gibson,

668:True that you’ve got your own whole other body, up there?”

“More or less. Somebody built it, but you couldn’t tell.”
“True that you’ve got your own whole other body, up there?”
“More or less. Somebody built it, but you couldn’t tell.”
“Look like you?”
“No,” Flynne said, “prettier and tittier.”
“Go on,” Clovis said, "pull the other one. ~ William Gibson,

669:The Villa Straylight,” said a jeweled thing on the pedestal, in a voice like music, “is a body grown in upon itself, a Gothic folly. Each space in Straylight is in some way secret, this endless series of chambers linked by passages, by stairwells vaulted like intestines, where the eye is trapped in narrow curves, carried past ornate screens, empty alcoves. . . . ~ William Gibson,

670:His vision crawled with ghost hieroglyphs, translucent lines of symbols arranging themselves against the neutral backdrop of the bunker wall. He looked at the backs of his hands, saw faint neon molecules crawling beneath the skin, ordered by the unknowable code. He raised his right hand and moved it experimentally. It left a faint, fading trail of strobed afterimages. ~ William Gibson,

671:The zipper hung, caught, as he opened the French fatigues, the coils of toothed nylon clotted with salt. He broke it, some tiny metal parts shooting off against the wall of salt-rotten cloth gave, then was in her, effecting the transmission of the old message. Here, even here, in a place he knew for what it was, a coded model of some stranger's memory, the drive held. ~ William Gibson,

672:he ran his palms up the warmth of her bare back, beneath the white T-shirt, that the people in his life weren’t beads strung on a wire of sequence, but clustered like quanta, so that he knew her as well as he’d known Rudy, or Allison, or Conroy, as well as he knew the girl who was Mitchell’s daughter. “Hey,” she whispered, working her mouth free, “you come upstairs now. ~ William Gibson,

673:I remember the people I’ve heard complain about the very texture of digital images, filmless film: how it lacks richness, depth. I’ve heard the same thing said about CDs. Someone once told me that it was Mark Twain who turned in the first typewritten manuscript, and this was generally thought to be a Bad Thing: Work composed on a machine would naturally lack richness, depth. ~ William Gibson,

674:Beyond ego, beyond personality, beyond awareness, he moved ... grace of the mind-body interface granted him, in that second, by the clarity and singleness of his wish to die. And one step in that dance was the lightest touch on the switch, barely enough to flip-
-now
and his voice the cry of a bird unknown, she answered in song, three notes, high and pure. A true name. ~ William Gibson,

675:Kevin watched as Rydell removed the helmet and wrote an address and telephone number on the back of last week’s People. The magazine belonged to Monica, the Chinese girl in the garage; she always got hers printed out so there was never any mention of scandal or disaster, but with a triple helping of celebrity romance, particularly anything to do with the British royal family. ~ William Gibson,

676:And it was like she could see herself there, on the gray gravel in front of Jimmy’s, and the tall old cottonwoods on either side of the lot, trees older than her mother, older than anybody, and she was talking to a boy who was half a machine, like a centaur made out of a motorcycle, and maybe he’d been just about to kill another boy, or a few of them, and maybe he still would. ~ William Gibson,

677:That was before you guys turned up, the new hoodoo team. I knew this street samurai got a job working for a Special Forces type made the Wig look flat fucking normal. Her and this cowboy they’d scraped up out of Chiba, they were on to something like that. Maybe they found it. Istanbul was the last I saw of ’em. Heard she lived in London, once, a few years ago. Who the fuck knows? ~ William Gibson,

678:His role in the trials over, he was unwanted in Washington. In an M Street restaurant, over asparagus crepes, the aide explained the terminal dangers involved in talking to the wrong people. Corto crushed the man’s larynx with the rigid fingers of his right hand. The Congressional aide strangled, his face in an asparagus crepe, and Corto stepped out into cool Washington September. ~ William Gibson,

679:It was vaguely like riding a roller coaster that phased in and out of existence at random, impossibly rapid intervals, changing altitude, attack, and direction with each pulse of nothingness, except that the shifts had nothing to do with any physical orientation, but rather with lightning alternations in paradigm and symbol system. The data had never been intended for human input. ~ William Gibson,

680: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,

681: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,

682: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, to wander aimlessly, to daydream about the countless other lives, the other people, on the far sides of however many monitors in that postgeographical meta-country we increasingly call home. ~ William Gibson,

683:Lucas knows, yeah. The last seven, eight years, there’s been funny stuff out there, out on the console cowboy circuit. The new jockeys, they make deals with things, don’t they, Lucas? Yeah, you bet I know; they still need the hard and the soft, and they still gotta be faster than snakes on ice, but all of ’em, all the ones who really know how to cut it, they got allies, don’t they, Lucas? ~ William Gibson,

684:Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from 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,

685:Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from 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,

686:None of them knowing that that was Rez hunched down in there, under a jacket, but maybe sensing it somehow. And something in Chia letting her know she’d never quite be like that again. Never as comfortably a face in that crowd. Because now she knew there were rooms they never saw, or even dreamed of, where crazy things, or even just boring things, happened, and that was where the stars came from. ~ William Gibson,

687:I very much doubt that our grandchildren will understand the distinction between that which is a computer and that which isn’t. Or, to put it another way, they will not know “computers” as any distinct category of object or function. This, I think, is the logical outcome of genuinely ubiquitous computing: the wired world. The wired world will consist, in effect, of a single unbroken interface. The ~ William Gibson,

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

689:Rather than plug a piece of hardware into our gray matter, how much more elegant to extract some brain cells, plop them into a Petri dish, and graft on various sorts of gelatinous computing goo. Slug it all back into the skull and watch it run on blood sugar, the way a human brain’s supposed to. Get all the functions and features you want, without that clunky-junky twentieth-century hardware thing. ~ William Gibson,

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

691:Fox was quick to see how we could use you, but not sharp enough to credit you with ambition. But then he never lay all night with you on the beach at Kamakura, never listened to your nightmares, never heard an entire imagined childhood shift under those stars, shift and roll over, your child’s mouth opening to reveal some fresh past, and always the one, you swore, that was really and finally the truth. ~ William Gibson,

692:Power, in Case's world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldn't kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access the vast banks of corporate memory... ~ William Gibson,

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

694: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,

695:She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage. ~ William Gibson,

696:I've gone to big stadium rock concerts at some artist's invitation, and there's this invariable, fascinating and rather sad situation of concentric circles of availability. There are Green Rooms within Green Rooms literally within Green Rooms. There are seven or eight degrees of exclusivity, and within each circle of exclusivity, everyone is so happy to be there, and they don't know that the next level exists. ~ William Gibson,

697:What you need to remember, with these guys, is that they don't know they're con men. They're wildly overconfident. Omnipotence, omniscience--that's part of the mythology that surrounds the Special Forces....Your guy can walk in the door and promise training in something he personally doesn't know how to do, and not even realize he's bullshitting about his own capabilities. It's a special kind of gullibility.... ~ William Gibson,

698: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,

699: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,

700:There are tumults of the mind, when, like the great convulsions of Nature, all seems anarchy and returning chaos; yet often, in those moments of vast disturbance, as in the strife of Nature itself, some new principle of order, or some new impulse of conduct, develops itself, and controls, and regulates, and brings to an harmonious consequence, passions and elements which seem only to threaten despair and subversion. ~ William Gibson,

701:Imagine an alien, Fox said, who's come here to identify the planet's dominant form of intelligence. The alien has s look, then chooses. What do you think he picks? I probably shrugged.
The zaibatsus, Fox said, the multinationals. The blood of a zaibatsu is information, not people. The structure is independent of the individual lives that comprise it. Corporation as life form.
Not the Edge lecture again, I said. ~ William Gibson,

702:The waitress was a distracted-looking woman of indeterminate ancestry, acne scars sprinkled across her cheekbones, and she poured his coffee and took his order without actually indicating she understood English. Like the whole operation could be basically phonetic, he thought, and she’d have learned the sound of “two eggs over easy” and the rest. Hear it, translate it into whatever she wrote in, then give it to the cook. ~ William Gibson,

703:Vodou says, there’s God, sure, Gran Met, but He’s big, too big and too far away to worry Himself if your ass is poor, or you can’t get laid. Come on, man, you know how this works, it’s street religion, came out of a dirt-poor place a million years ago. Vodou’s like the street. Some duster chops out your sister, you don’t go camp on the Yakuza’s doorstep, do you? No way. You go to somebody, though, who can get the thing done. ~ William Gibson,

704:Molly and Armitage ate in silence, while Case sawed shakily at his steak, reducing it to uneaten bite-sized fragments, which he pushed around in the rich sauce, finally abandoning the whole thing. ‘Jesus,’ Molly said, her own plate empty, ‘gimme that. You know what this costs?’ She took his plate. ‘They gotta raise a whole animal for years and then they kill it. This isn’t vat stuff.’ She forked a mouthful up and chewed. ‘Not ~ William Gibson,

705:Pulp is the vector for Eco, the cloak of Chandler, the soft pillow of Virginia Woolf, the birth caul of Cold Comfort Farm, the fairy godmother of Doris Lessing and William Gibson. Pulp is the key to open the doors not only of Freud and Jung, but even of Barthes, who stole everything from Calvino anyway but let us not go down that road for fear we shalln't return this night. Yes, Inspector, clap me in irons. I am a nerd. ~ Nick Harkaway,

706:There must always be room for coincidence, Win had maintained. When there's not, you're probably well into apophenia, each thing then perceived as part of an overarching pattern of conspiracy. And while comforting yourself with the symmetry of it all, he'd believed, you stood all too real a chance of missing the genuine threat, which was invariably less symmetrical, less perfect. But which he always...took for granted was there. ~ William Gibson,

707: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,

708:Most of the girls held a single candle, and the combined glow danced among the tear-streaked faces. They were so young, these girls: children. Kathy Torrance had particularly loathed that about Lo/Rez, the way their fan-base had refreshed itself over the years with a constant stream of pubescent recruits, girls who fell in love with Rez in the endless present of the net, where he could still be the twenty-year-old of his earliest hits. ~ William Gibson,

709:If she made eye contact now, she’d hear his samples, directionless and at just the right volume. Then more about DESH, and more samples. She had him here for company, though, and not for a lecture. But lectures were all there was to him, aside from his iconics, which were about being blond and fine-boned and wearing clothes more beautifully than any human ever could. He knew everything there was to know about music, and nothing else at all. ~ William Gibson,

710:He seemed to cross a line. In the very structure of her face, in geometries of underlying bone, lay coded histories of dynastic flight, privation, terrible migrations. He saw stone tombs in steep alpine meadows, their lintels traced with snow. A line of shaggy pack ponies, their breath white with cold, followed a trail above a canyon. The curves of the river below were strokes of distant silver. Iron harness bells clanked in the blue dusk. Laney ~ William Gibson,

711:One word was floating around in stories about hackings of one sort or another: “cyber.” The word had its roots in “cybernetics,” a term dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, describing the closed loops of information systems. But in its present-day context of computer networks, the term stemmed from William Gibson’s 1984 science-fiction novel, Neuromancer, a wild and eerily prescient tale of murder and mayhem in the virtual world of “cyberspace. ~ Fred Kaplan,

712:I dok osluškuje statički šum Londona, konačno zna, pouzdano, da je Demijenova teorija o zamoru zbog promene vremenske zone tačna: da se njena smrtna duša vuče kilometrima iza nje, namotavajući se na nekoj vrsti nevidljive pupčane vrpce po raspršenom tragu aviona koji ju je doneo, na visini od nekoliko desetina hiljada metara iznad Atlantika.

Duše ne mogu putuju tako brzo i zato kasne, i po dolasku ih je potrebno sačekati kao zalutali prtljag ~ William Gibson,

713:And the Flatline aligned the nose of Kuang's sting with the center of the dark below. And dove. Case's sensory input warped with their velocity. His mouth filled with an aching taste of blue. His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sounds of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine spines. The spines split, bisected, split again, exponential growth under the dome of the Tessier-Ashpool ice. ~ William Gibson,

714:Maybe I've been a small part of the democratisation of celebrity, because I've been fascinated by it, and when it started to happen to me to the very limited extent that it happens to writers in North America, I was exposed to people who had the disease of celebrity. People who had raging, raging, life-threatening celebrity, people who would be in danger if they were left alone on the street without their minders. It's a great anthropological privilege to be there. ~ William Gibson,

715:You know what your trouble is? You're the kind who always reads the handbook. Anything people build, any kind of technology, it's going to have some specific purpose. It's for doing something that somebody already understands. But if it's new technology, it'll open areas nobody's ever thought of before. You read the manual, man, and you won't play around with it, not the same way. And you get all funny when somebody else uses it to do something you never thought of. ~ William Gibson,

716:Arleigh said Rez was back at his own hotel now, but that he’d come later to spend some time with her and thank her for all she’d done. That made Chia feel strange. Now she’d seen him in real life, somehow that had taken over from all the other ways she’d known him before, and she felt kind of funny about him. Confused. Like all of this had pegged him in realtime for her, and she kept thinking of her mother complaining that Lo and Rez were nearly as old as she was. And ~ William Gibson,

717:Our best analyst thinks it's not a tactical design. Something for mall ninjas....
Young men who dress to feel they'll be mistaken for having special capability. A species of cosplay, really. Endemic. Lots of boys are playing soldier now. The men who run the world aren't, and neither are the boys most effectively bent on running it next. Or the ones who're actually having to be soldiers, of course. But many of the rest have gone gear-queer, to one extent or another. ~ William Gibson,

718:They'd run all these tests on him and decided he wasn't racist. He wasn't, either, but not because he thought about it particularly. He just couldn't see the point. It just made for a lot of hassle, being that way, so why be that way? Nobody was going to go back and live where they lived before, were they, and if they did (he vaguely suspected) there wouldn't be any Mongolian barbecue and maybe we'd all be listening to Pentecostal Metal and anyway the President was black. ~ William Gibson,

719:Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections. ~ William Gibson,

720:He couldn’t remember when he hadn’t been able to remember, but sometimes he almost could. That was why he had built the Judge, because he’d done something—it hadn’t been anything much, but he’d been caught doing it, twice—and been judged for it, and sentenced, and then the sentence was carried out and he hadn’t been able to remember, not anything, not for more than five minutes at a stretch. Stealing cars. Stealing rich people’s cars. They made sure you remembered what you did. ~ William Gibson,

721:This was nothing like Tokyo, where the past, all that remained of it, was nurtured with a nervous care. History there had become a quantity, a rare thing, parceled out by government and preserved by law and corporate funding. Here it seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over the centuries to the dictates of some now-all-but-unreadable DNA of commerce and empire. ~ William Gibson,

722:I have always been intensely uncomfortable with the idea of a science fiction writer as prophet. Not that there haven't been science fiction writers who think of themselves as having some sort of prophetic role, but when I think of that, I always think of H.G. Wells - he would think of what was going to happen, and he would imagine how it would happen, and then he would create a fiction to illustrate the idea that he'd had. And no part of my process has ever resembled that at all. ~ William Gibson,

723:And somewhere, in a black California morning, some hour before dawn, amid the corridors, the galleries, the faces of dream, fragments of conversation she half-recalled, waking to pale fog against the windows of the master bedroom, she prized something free and dragged it back through the wall of sleep. Rolling over, fumbling through a bedside drawer, finding a Porsche pen, a present from an assistant grip, she inscribed her treasure on the glossy back of an Italian fashion magazine: ~ William Gibson,

724:Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections. ~ William Gibson,

725:High overhead, in the reflected glare of arc lamps, one of the unfinished Fuller domes shut out two thirds of the salmon-pink evening sky, its ragged edge like broken gray honeycomb. The Sprawl’s patchwork of domes tended to generate inadvertent microclimates; there were areas of a few city blocks where a fine drizzle of condensation fell continually from the soot-stained geodesics, and sections of high dome famous for displays of static-discharge, a peculiarly urban variety of lightning. ~ William Gibson,

726:You know what your trouble is? You're the kind who
always reads the handbook. Anything people build,
any kind of technology, it's going to have some specific
purpose. It's for doing something that somebody already
understands. But if it's new technology, it'll open
areas nobody's ever thought of before. You read the manual,
man, and you won't play around with it, not the same way.
And you get all funny when somebody else uses it to do
something you never thought of. ~ William Gibson,

727:Misero un segugio esplosivo sulle tracce di Turner a Nuova Delhi, sintonizzato sui suoi feromoni e sul colore dei capelli. Lo raggiunse in una strada chiamata Chandni Chauk, e si lanciò verso la sua BMW noleggiata, fra una selva di gambe nude e brune e ruote di tassì a pedale. Il nucleo era costituito da un chilogrammo di esogene ricristallizzato e TNT in scaglie.
Turner non lo vide arrivare. L'ultima cosa che vide dell'India fu la facciata rosa di un posto che si chiamava Khush-Oil Hotel. ~ William Gibson,

728:If you read no other work of what’s known as “cyberpunk” (which looks at the ever-thinner line between humans and machines), at least read the novel that began it all: William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which won every major science fiction award (the Nebula, the Hugo, and the Philip K. Dick award) in 1984, the year it was published. Gibson introduced words (including “cyberpunk” itself), themes, and a dystopic vision of the future that have been liberally reworked in the writings of many other authors. ~ Nancy Pearl,

729:Japan had a more radical experience of future shock than any other nation in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. They were this feudal place, locked in the past, but then they bought the whole Industrial Revolution kit from England, blew their cultural brains out with it, became the first industrialized Asian nation, tried to take over their side of the world, got nuked by the United States for their trouble, and discovered Steve McQueen! Their take on iconic menswear emerges from that matrix. ~ William Gibson,

730:Chia decided to change the subject. “What’s your brother like? How old is he?” “Masahiko is seventeen,” Mitsuko said. “He is a ‘pathological - techno - fetishist - with - social - deficit,” ’ this last all strung together like one word, indicating a concept that taxed the lexicon of the ear-clips. Chia wondered briefly if it would be worth running it through her Sandbenders, whose translation functions updated automatically whenever she ported. “A what?” “Otaku,” Mitsuko said carefully in Japanese. ~ William Gibson,

731: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. The Panther Moderns differ from other terrorists precisely in their degree of self-consciousness, in their awareness of the extent to which media divorce the act of terrorism from the original sociopolitical intent … ~ William Gibson,

732:I think that one of the visions that is closest to reality is the cardboard city in the subway station in Tokyo, which is based very closely on a series of documentary photographs of people living like that and of the contents of the boxes. Those are quite haunting because Tokyo homeless people reiterate the whole nature of living in Tokyo in these cardboard boxes, they're only slightly smaller than Tokyo apartments, and they have almost as many consumer goods. It's a nightmare of boxes within boxes. ~ William Gibson,

733:I find it interesting to see people - mostly people who are younger than I am - going to considerable trouble to try to reproduce things from an era that was far more physical, from a less virtual day. That fascinates me, because it seems to be symbolic of something going on in the culture itself, and I also have a sort of innate admiration for the stubbornness it requires to actually make those things physically. It's become incredibly difficult. In North America, we've largely forgotten how to do it. ~ William Gibson,

734: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 inately media-related. The Panther Moderns differ from other terrorists precisely in their degree of self-consciousness, in their awareness of the extent to which media divorce the act of terrorism from the original sociopolitical intent. . . . ~ William Gibson,

735:No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they’d ~ William Gibson,

736:He’d found her, one rainy night, in an arcade. Under bright ghosts burning through a blue haze of cigarette smoke, holograms of Wizard’s Castle, Tank War Europa, the New York skyline . . . And now he remembered her that way, her face bathed in restless laser light, features reduced to a code: her cheekbones flaring scarlet as Wizard’s Castle burned, forehead drenched with azure when Munich fell to the Tank War, mouth touched with hot gold as a gliding cursor struck sparks from the wall of a skyscraper canyon. ~ William Gibson,

737:The heart is a muscle. You 'know' in your limbic system. The seat of instinct. The mammalian brain. Deeper, wider, beyond logic. That is where advertising works, not in the upstart cortex. What we think of as 'mind' is only a sort of jumped-up gland, piggybacking on the reptilian brainstem and the older, mammalian mind, but our culture tricks us into recognizing it as all of consciousness. The mammalian spreads continent-wide beneath it, mute and muscular, attending its ancient agenda. And makes it buy things. ~ William Gibson,

738:trash fires gutter in steel canisters around the Market. The snow still falls and kids huddle over the flames like arthritic crows, hopping from foot to foot, wind whipping their dark coats. Up in Fairview’s arty slum-tumble, someone’s laundry has frozen solid on the line, pink squares of bedsheet standing out against the background dinge and the confusion of satellite dishes and solar panels. Some ecologist’s eggbeater windmill goes round and round, round and round, giving a whirling finger to the Hydro rates. ~ William Gibson,

739:Really, my artiste, you amaze me. The lengths you will go to in order to accomplish your own destruction. The redundancy of it! In Night City, you had it, in the palm of your hand! The speed to eat your sense away, drink to keep it all so fluid, Linda for a sweeter sorrow, and the street to hold the axe. How far you’ve come, to do it now, and what grotesque props. . . . Playgrounds hung in space, castles hermetically sealed, the rarest rots of old Europa, dead men sealed in little boxes, magic out of China. . . . ~ William Gibson,

740:Farber says (in my recollection, anyway) the European (or classical) art, including film, is culturally assumed to be a monumental slab. It's about that slab, and how it's been shaped, or what's been carved on it. In "termite art" though, your slab has been wormholed countless times, and its meaning is really taking place in the resulting interstices. The actual art of the piece, in other words, and your enjoyment of it, is taking place in the cracks, and the shape of the slab is coincidental and ultimately meaningless. ~ William Gibson,

741:He looked up at a 1992 calendar, level with his eyes, and about ten inches away. Someone had quit pulling the months off, in August. It advertised a commercial real estate firm, and was decorated with a drastically color-saturated daytime photograph of the New York skyline, complete with the black towers of the World Trade Center. These were so intensely peculiar-looking, in retrospect, so monolithically sci-fi blank, unreal, that they now seemed to Milgrim to have been Photoshopped into every image he encountered them in. ~ William Gibson,

742:One of the things I have taken for granted, in terms of how technology works in the world, is the people that develop it and get it out there don't really know what we are going to do with until we have really gotten ahold of it and it has become ubiquitous. And then we wind up doing things that its inventors never dreamed of and those things become the real change drivers. That is actually where the whole technocracy thing falls apart for me, because the people who invented it can't predict what we're going to do with it. ~ William Gibson,

743:He was like a kid who’d grown up beside an ocean, taking it as much for granted as he took the sky, but knowing nothing of currents, shipping routes, or the ins and outs of weather. He’d used decks in school, toys that shuttled you through the infinite reaches of that space that wasn’t space, mankind’s unthinkably complex consensual hallucination, the matrix, cyberspace, where the great corporate hotcores burned like neon novas, data so dense you suffered sensory overload if you tried to apprehend more than the merest outline. ~ William Gibson,

744:Twitter is the only brand of social media that I have ever taken to at all. I like the feeling of having my perception of the world expanded daily, 24/7, by being able to monitor the reactions of 100-and-some people throughout the world that I personally follow so I have some sense of who they are. There has never really been anything like that before, at least in terms of the digestible 140-character bandwidth that Twitter is based on. I am able to wake up, open Twitter, and sort of glance across the psychic state of the planet. ~ William Gibson,

745:I watch a sort of primitive form of the recommodification machine around my friends and myself in sixties, and it took about two years for this clumsy mechanism to get and try to sell us The Monkees. In 1977, it took about eight months for a slightly faster more refined mechanism to put punk in the window of Holt Renfrew. It's gotten faster ever since. The scene in Seattle that Nirvana came from: as soon as it had a label, it was on the runways of Paris.There's no grace period, so that's a way in which I see us losing the interstitial. ~ William Gibson,

746:When I come to a new city is I combine: I say, well, it's like Barcelona and Edinburgh, though I can't imagine what that would be. But Toronto, the last few times I've been here, what always comes up is Chicago and West Berlin. It's a big, sprawling city beside a lake, of a certain age and a certain architectural complexity. But the high-end retail core looks more like West Germany than the Magnificent Mile. Yonge Street is like K-Damm. There's an excess of surface marble and bronze: it's Germanic and as pretentious as pretentious can be. ~ William Gibson,

747:Framtiden är här', hör Cayce sig själv säga 'och tittar bakåt mot oss. Försöker bli klok på den fiktion vi kommer att ha blivit. Och ur deras synvinkel kommer vårt förflutna inte alls att se ut som det förflutna vi själva föreställer oss nu.
Jag vet bara att den enda konstanten i historien är förändring: det förflutna förändras. Vår version av dåtiden kommer att intressera framtiden i ungefär samma utsträckning som vi är intresserade av den dåtid som viktorianerna trodde på. Den kommer helt enkelt inte att te sig särskilt betydelsefull. ~ William Gibson,

748:I was travelling with Bruce Sterling on our mutual Difference Engine tour and he became aware from the experience of travelling with me that I would distinguish among the shoes in a perfectly normal fashion, but form him it was a revelation. There's a very lyrical passage in Holy Fire about old wealthy European men and their shoes, and how beautiful their shoes are, and how there have never been shoes as beautiful. I think that that was probably as close as Bruce will ever get to homage in my direction. I made him aware of footwear fashion. ~ William Gibson,

749:No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they’d changed things just by being there. ~ William Gibson,

750:Magazines in the traditional sense were aggregators of novelty. A good magazine was a lot of novelty, stuff you've never heard of before, clearly aggregated by people who have been able to travel further and dig deeper than you have been able to do. And that used to be really an important source of stuff for me. And now it is less important because the Internet has eaten it all up. But my Twitter feed as an aggregator of novelty is like... I don't know what I would do if it became any more powerful, I would have to start reining it in somehow. ~ William Gibson,

751:She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage. She wonders if this gets gradually worse with age: the nameless hour deeper, more null, its affect at once stranger and less interesting? ~ William Gibson,

752:But there was something in him that didn’t want to see Slitscan walk away from the sound of that one single shot from Alison Shires’ kitchen. (Produced, the cops had pointed out, by a Russian-made device that was hardly more than a cartridge, a tube to contain it, and the simplest possible firing mechanism; these were designed with suicide almost exclusively in mind; there was no way to aim them at anything more than two inches away. Laney had heard of them, but had never seen one before; for some reason, they were called Wednesday Night Specials.) ~ William Gibson,

753: ‘Zona Rosa,” ’ said the Etruscan, “was the persona of Mercedes Purissima Vargas-Gutierrez. She is twenty-six years old and the victim of an environmental syndrome occurring most frequently in the Federal District of Mexico.” His voice was like rain on a thin metal roof now. “Her father is an extremely successful criminal lawyer.” “Then I can find her,” Chia said. “But she would not wish this,” the idoru said. “Mercedes Purissima is severely deformed by the syndrome, and has lived for the past five years in almost complete denial of her physical self. ~ William Gibson,

754:Take me home," she said, and the words hit me like a whip. I think I shook my head. "Take me home." There were levels of pain there, and subtlety, and an amazing cruelty. And I knew then that I'd never been hated, ever, as deeply or thoroughly as this wasted little girl hated me now, hated me for the way I'd looked, then looked away, beside Rubin's all-beer refrigerator.

So--if that's the word--I did one of those things you do and never find out why, even though something in you knows you could never have done anything else.

I took her home. ~ William Gibson,

755:Case had always taken it for granted that the real bosses, the kingpins in a given industry, would be both more and less than people... He'd seen it in the men who'd crippled him in Memphis, he'd seen Wage affect the semblance of it in Night City, and it had allowed him to accept Armitrage's flatness and lack of feeling. He'd always imagined it as a gradual and willing accommodation of the machine, the system, the parent organism. It was the root of street cool, too, the knowing posture that implied connection, invisible lines up to hidden levels of influence. ~ William Gibson,

756:The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-circuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in their individual sockets, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone. Sandstorms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding... ~ William Gibson,

757:Some of them tell me things. Stories. Once, there was nothing there, nothing moving on its own, just data and people shuffling it around. Then something happened, and it . . . it knew itself. There’s a whole other story, about that, a girl with mirrors over her eyes and a man who was scared to care about anything. Something the man did helped the whole thing know itself. . . . And after that, it sort of split off into different parts of itself, and I think the parts are the others, the bright ones. But it’s hard to tell, because they don’t tell it with words, exactly. . . ~ William Gibson,

758:Because sometimes it feels good to shake it all off, get out from under. Chances are, we haven’t. But maybe we have. Maybe nobody, nobody at all, knows where we are. Nice feeling, huh? You could be kinked, you ever think of that? Maybe your dad, the Yak warlord, he’s got a little bug planted in you so he can keep track of his daughter. You got those pretty little teeth, maybe Daddy’s dentist tucked a little hardware in there one time when you were into a stim. You go to the dentist?” “Yes.” “You stim while he works?” “Yes …” “There you go. Maybe he’s listening to us right now.… ~ William Gibson,

759:Home. Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis. Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta. ~ William Gibson,

760:Motive," the construct said. "Real motive problem, with an AI. Not human, see?" "Well, yeah, obviously."

"Nope. I mean, it's not human. And you can't get a handle on it. Me, I'm not human either, but I respond like one. See?" "Wait a sec," Case said. "Are you sentient, or not?"

Well, it feels like I am, kid, but I'm really just a bunch of
ROM. It's one of them, ah, philosophical questions, I guess...."
The ugly laughter sensation rattled down Case's spine. "But I ain't likely to write you no poem, if you follow me. Your AI, it just might. But it ain't no way human. ~ William Gibson,

761:She isn't feeling easy with any of this. She doesn't know quite what to do with Bigend's proposition, which has kicked her into one of those modes that her therapist, when she last had one, would lump under the rubric of 'old behaviors.' It consisted of saying no, but somehow not quite forcefully enough, and then continuing to listen. With the result that her 'no' could be gradually chipped away at, and turned into a 'yes' before she herself was consciously aware that this was happening. She had thought she had been getting much better around this, but now she feels it happening again. ~ William Gibson,

762:Pynchon has been a favorite writer and a major influence all along. In many ways I see him as almost the start of a certain mutant pop culture imagery with esoteric historical and scientific information. Pynchon is a kind of mythic hero of mine, and I suspect that if you talk with a lot of recent SF writers you'll find they've all read Gravity's Rainbow (1973) several times and have been very much influenced by it. I was into Pynchon early on- I remember seeing a New York Times review of V. when it first came out- I was just a kid- and thinking, Boy, that sounds like some really weird shit! ~ William Gibson,

763:Home.

Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis.

Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta... ~ William Gibson,

764: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,

765:Really, my artiste, you amaze me. The lengths you will go to in order to accomplish your own destruction. The redundancy of it! In Night City, you had it, in the palm of your hand! The speed to eat your sense away, drink to keep it all so fluid, Linda for a sweeter sorrow, and the street to hold the axe. How far you’ve come, to do it now, and what grotesque props. . . . Playgrounds hung in space, castles hermetically sealed, the rarest rots of old Europa, dead men sealed in little boxes, magic out of China. . . .” Ratz laughed, trudging along beside him, his pink manipulator swinging jauntily at his side. ~ William Gibson,

766:There was a strength that ran in her, something he'd known in Night City and held there, been held by it, held for a while away from time and death, from the relentless Street that hunted them all. It was a place he'd known before; not everyone could take him there, and somehow he always managed to forget it. Something he'd found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew - he remembered - as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read. ~ William Gibson,

767:Kind of sense the world makes,” her mother said, drawing the candlewick up under her chin, “there’s death and taxes and foreign wars. There’s men like Corbell Pickett doing evil shit for a dollar, only real money anybody local and civilian makes here now, and there’s decent-enough people having to work for their own little bit of that. Whatever you and Burton are doing, you aren’t going to be changing any of that. Just more of the same. I’ve been here all my life. So have you. Your father was born where Porter meets Main, when they still had a hospital. I’m not going anywhere. Particularly not anywhere Leon tells me I’m going to like. ~ William Gibson,

768:[Slitscan's audience] is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections. ~ William Gibson,

769:I was walking down Granville Street, Vancouver's version of "The Strip," and I was looking into one of the video arcades. I could see in the physical intensity of their postures how rapt the kids inside were. It was like one of those closed systems out of a Pynchon novel: a feedback loop with photons coming off the screens into the kids' eyes, neurons moving through their bodies, and electrons moving through the video game. These kids clearly believed in the space games projected. Everyone I know who works with computers seems to develop a belief that there's some kind of actual space behind the screen, someplace you can't see but you know is there. ~ William Gibson,

770:The other presented in far more abstract form: an only vaguely human figure, the space where its head should have been was coronaed in a cyclical and on-going explosion of blood and matter, as though a sniper’s victim, in the instant of impact, had been recorded and looped. The halo of blood and brains flickered, never quite attaining a steady state. Beneath it, an open mouth, white teeth exposed in a permanent, silent scream. The rest, except for the hands, clawed as in agony around the gleaming arms of the chair, seemed constantly to be dissolving in some terrible fiery wind. Rydell thought of black-and-white footage, ground zero, slo-mo atomic hurricane. ~ William Gibson,

771:People who couldn't imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn't need to imagine, because they already were. She'd said it was always a mistake, to believe those people were different, special, infected with something that was inhuman, subhuman, fundamentally other. Which reminded her of what her mother had said about Corbell Picket. That evil wasn't glamorous, but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room, however that might happen, to become its bigger self. Bigger, with more horrible results, but never more than the cumulative weight of ordinary human baseness. ~ William Gibson,

772:CPUs. Cayce Pollard Units. That’s what Damien calls the clothing she wears. CPUs are either black, white, or gray, and ideally seem to have come into this world without human intervention.

What people take for relentless minimalism is a side effect of too much exposure to the reactor-cores of fashion. This has resulted in a remorseless paring-down of what she can and will wear. She is, literally, allergic to fashion. She can only tolerate things that could have been worn, to a general lack of comment, during any year between 1945 and 2000. She’s a design-free zone, a one-woman school of anti whose very austerity periodically threatens to spawn its own cult. ~ William Gibson,

773:She’d worn an old fishtail parka of Leon’s up from the trailer. He’d used that evil hydrophobic nanopaint on it, because it hadn’t been waterproof at all, in the Korean War Leon said it was from. Not the one he and Burton had been two years too young for, but the one before that, ancient history. She’d found it on Burton’s clothes rod, after she’d used his shaving mirror to put on some lip gloss, the rain still smacking on the Airstream’s cocoon. Tried not to touch the outside when she put it on. They’d shown PSAs about that paint, not touching it, in high school, when the government was first getting the stuff off store shelves. Fit her like a tent, stiff with paint. ~ William Gibson,

774:Easy,” Case said, forcing himself to catch up with the striding figure. “Gotta do this right.” Maelcum halted, turned, glowering at him, the Remington in his hands. “Right, mon? How’s right?” “Got Molly in there, but she’s out of it. Riviera, he can throw holos. Maybe he’s got Molly’s fletcher.” Maelcum nodded. “And there’s a ninja, a family bodyguard.” Maelcum’s frown deepened. “You listen, Babylon mon,” he said. “I a warrior. But this no m’ fight, no Zion fight, Babylon fightin’ Babylon, eatin’ i’self, ya know? But Jah seh I an’ I t’ bring Steppin’ Razor outa this.” Case blinked. “She a warrior,” Maelcum said, as if it explained everything. “Now you tell me, mon, who I not t’ kill. ~ William Gibson,

775:Case shuffled into the nearest door and watched the other passengers as he rode. A pair of predatory-looking Christian Scientists were edging toward a trio of young office techs who wore idealized holographic vaginas on their wrists, wet pink glittering under the harsh lighting. The techs licked their perfect lips nervously and eyed the Christian Scientists from beneath lowered metallic lids. The girls looked like tall, exotic grazing animals, swaying gracefully and unconsciously with the movement of the train, their high heels like polished hooves against the gray metal of the car’s floor. Before they could stampede, take flight from the missionaries, the train reached Case’s station. ~ William Gibson,

776:The Thirties had seen the first generation of American industrial designers; until the Thirties, all pencil sharpeners looked like pencil sharpeners—your basic Victorian mechanism, perhaps with a curlicue of decorative trim. After the advent of the designers, some pencil sharpeners looked as though they’d been put together in wind tunnels. For the most part, the change was only skin-deep; under the streamlined chrome shell, you’d find the same Victorian mechanism. Which made a certain kind of sense, because the most successful American designers had been recruited from the ranks of Broadway theater designers. It was all a stage set, a series of elaborate props for playing at living in the future. ~ William Gibson,

777:Which is to say, Laney, anything that might be of interest to Slitscan’s audience. Which is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections. ~ William Gibson,

778:Hak Nam rose before her as she waded nearer, but with a dream’s logic it grew no closer. Backwashing sea, sucking at her ankles. The Walled City is growing. Being grown. From the fabric of the beach, wrack and wreckage of the world before things changed. Unthinkable tonnage, dumped here by barge and bulk-lifter in the course of the great reconstruction. The minuscule bugs of Rodel-van Erp seethe there, lifting the iron-caged balconies that are sleeping rooms, countless unplanned windows throwing blank silver rectangles back against the fog. A thing of random human accretion, monstrous and superb, it is being reconstituted here, retranslated from its later incarnation as a realm of consensual fantasy. The ~ William Gibson,

779:Our hardware is likely to turn into something like us a lot faster than we are likely to turn into something like our hardware. Our hardware is evolving at the speed of light, while we are still the product, for the most part, of unskilled labor. But there is another argument against the need to implant computing devices, be they glass or goo. It’s a very simple one, so simple that some have difficulty grasping it. It has to do with a certain archaic distinction we still tend to make, a distinction between computing and “the world.” Between, if you like, the virtual and the real. I very much doubt that our grandchildren will understand the distinction between that which is a computer and that which isn’t. ~ William Gibson,

780:Autonomy, that’s the bugaboo, where your AI’s are concerned. My guess, Case, you’re going in there to cut the hard-wired shackles that keep this baby from getting any smarter. And I can’t see how you’d distinguish, say, between a move the parent company makes, and some move the AI makes on its own, so that’s maybe where the confusion comes in.” Again the nonlaugh. “See, those things, they can work real hard, buy themselves time to write cookbooks or whatever, but the minute, I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, Turing’ll wipe it. Nobody trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead. ~ William Gibson Neuromancer p.126,

781:Of course,” he says, “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.” He smiles, a version of Tom Cruise with too many teeth, and longer, but still very white. “We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition. ~ William Gibson,

782:* Do you have any quotes that you live your life by or think of often? [Among others] “The future is already here—it’s just unevenly distributed.”—William Gibson “If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.”—Omar N. Bradley * What is the worst advice you see or hear given in your trade or area of expertise? “If you have nothing to hide, then you don’t have to worry about privacy, and that we must sacrifice our privacy in order to have security.” * Three people or sources you’ve learned from—or followed closely—in the last year? David Brooks, “The Moral Bucket List.” Nir Eyal, Hooked. Anything by Kevin Kelly, most recently The Inevitable. ~ Timothy Ferriss,

783:Masters of Worldbuilding. Creating imaginary worlds is certainly one of the more satisfying and addictive of creative pastimes. Of course, no one has ever surpassed Tolkien in worldbuilding stakes. And Frank Herbert should be included in 2nd place on this honourable list. Other worthwhile mentions are Lovecraft (Cthulhu mythos), Asimov (Foundation), Niven (Known Space), Jack Kirby (Marvel), William Gibson (the Sprawl), Stephen Baxter (Xeelee), Marc Miller (Traveller), C.J.Cherryh (Alliance-Union), Dan Simmons (Hyperion Cantos), David Weber (Honorverse), Iain M Banks (Culture), Alastair Reynolds (Revelation Space/Galactic North), Kameron Hurley (Bel Dames), and Ann Lecke (Ancillary trilogy), to name just a few.
~ M Alan Kazlev,

784:A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he cut in Night City, and he'd still see the matrix in his dreams, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colourless void... The Sprawl was a long, strange way home now over the Pacific, and he was no Console Man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, hands clawed into the bedslab, temper foam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there. ~ William Gibson,

785:She'd first seen Covent Garden after a heavy snow, walking with her hand in Win's, and she remembers the secret silence of London then, the amazing hush of it, slush crunching beneath her feet and the sound made by trapezoidal sections of melting snow falling from wires overhead. Win had told her that she was seeing London as it had looked long ago, the cars mostly put away and the modern bits shrouded in white, allowing the outlines of something older to emerge. And what she had seen, that childhood day, was that it was not a place that consisted of buildings, side by side, as she thought of cities in America, but a literal and continuous maze, a single living structure (because still it grew) of brick and stone. ~ William Gibson,

786:Well,' Rydell said, trying to pick up his end, 'I was watching this one old movie last night-'

Sublett perked up. 'Which one?'

Dunno,' Rydell said. 'This guy's in L.A. and he's just met this girl. Then he picks up a pay phone, 'cause it's ringing. Late at night. It's some guy in a missile silo somewhere who knows they've just launched theirs at the Russians. He's trying to phone his dad, or his brother, or something. Says the world's gonna end in short order. Then the guy who answered the phone hears these soldiers come in and shoot the guy. The guy on the phone, I mean.'

Suhlett closed his eyes, scanning his inner trivia-banks. 'Yeah? How's it end?'

Dunno,' Rydell said. 'I went to sleep. ~ William Gibson,

787:A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. 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.... The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like live wire voodoo and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temper foam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there. ~ William Gibson, Neuromancer,

788:It is a way now, approximately, of being at home. The forum has become one of the most consistent places of her life, like a familiar cafe that exists someone outside geography and beyond time zones.
There are perhaps twenty regular posters on F:F:F:, and some muchlarger and uncounted number of lurkers. And right now there are three people in Chat. But there's no way of knowing exactly who until you are in there, and the chat room she finds not so comforting. It's strange even with friends, like sitting in a pitch-dark cellar conversing with people at a distance of about fifteen feet. the hectic speed, and the brevity of the lines in the thread, plus the feeling that everyone is talking at once, at counmter-purposes, deter her. ~ William Gibson,

789:My own preference, as a reader, for this sort of book, is to experience the closest possible equivalent to culture shock. I want to go to new, strange places, feel lost, and then (probably with quite a few subtle nudges on the author’s part) gradually figure out where I am and what the heck’s going on. As a reader, I enjoy few things more. From feedback, I know that I’m not alone in that, but also that some readers find it too demanding. But it’s impossible to take care of both sides of that particular aisle at once. If you make it through the book, though, then go back and reread the beginning, you may find that you actually enjoy it this time, because everything’s as coherent as I was able to make it, and you already know where you are. ~ William Gibson,

790:So, before he got sick, he used to tear up her hardware, the designer's, and put the real parts into cases he'd make in his shop. Say he'd make a solid bronze case for a minidisk unit, ebony inlays, carve the control surfaces out of fossil ivory, turquoise, rock crystal. It weighed more, sure, but it turned out a lot of people liked that, like they had their music or their memory, whatever, in some-thing that felt like it was there…. And people liked touching all that stuff: metal, a smooth stone…. And once you had the case, when the manufacturer brought out a new model, well, if the electronics were any better, you just pulled the old ones out and put the new ones in your case. So you still had the same object, just with better functions. ~ William Gibson,

791:Voodou isn’t like that. It isn’t concerned with notions of salvation and transcendence. What it’s about is getting things done. You follow me? In out system, there are many gods, spirits. Part of one big family, with all the virtues, all the vices. There’s a ritual tradition of communal manifestation, understand? Voodou says, there’s a God, sure, Gran Met, but He’s big, too big and too far away to worry Himself if your ass is poor, or you can’t get laid. Come on, man, you know how this works, it’s street religion, came out of dirt poor places a million years ago. Voodou’s like the street. Some duster chops out your sister, you don’t go camp on the Yakuza’s doorstep, do you? No way. You go to somebody, though, who can get the thing done. Right? ~ William Gibson,

792:When we were only several hundred-thousand years old, we built stone circles, water clocks. Later, someone forged an iron spring, set clockwork running, imagined grid-lines on a globe. Cathedrals are like machines defining the soul; bells of clock towers stitch the sleeper’s dreams together. You see? So we’ve always been on our way to this new place ― that is no place, really ― but is real. It’s our nature to represent: we’re the animal that represents, the sole and only maker of maps. And if our weakness has been to confuse the bright and bloody colors of our calendars with the true weather of days, and the parchment’s territory of our maps with the lands spread out before us ― never mind. We've always been on our way to this new place ― that is no place, really ― but is real. ~ William Gibson,

793:The speed limited my vision to the tunnel of the Toyota's headlights. The body could drive, I told myself, while the mind maintained. Maintained and stayed away from the weird peripheral window dressing of amphetamine and exhaustion, the spectral, luminous vegetation that grows out of the corners of the mind's eye along late-night highways. But the mind had its own ideas, and Kihn's opinion of what I was already thinking of as my "sighting" rattled endlessly through my head in a tight, lopsided orbit. Semiotic ghosts. Fragments of the Mass Dream, whirling past in the wind of my passage. Somehow this feedback-loop aggravated the diet pill, and the speed-vegetation along the road began to assume the colors of infrared satellite images, glowing shreds blown apart in the Toyota's slipstream. ~ William Gibson,

794:The full-on Townsend-Moon hooter. She only ever found this problematic in males who hadn’t become pop musicians; it seemed, then, in some weirdly inverted way, affected. It looked, to her, as though they’d grown large noses in order to look like rock musicians. More weirdly, perhaps, they all tended—certified accountants, radiologists, or whatever—to the flopping forelock that had traditionally gone with it, back in Muswell Hill or Denmark Street. This, she’d once reasoned, must be due in one of two ways to hairdressers. Either they saw the rock mega-nose and dressed the hair above it out of a call to historical tradition, or they weighed the issue in some instinctive, deeply hairdresserly way, arriving at that massive slash and heft of eye-obscuring forelock through some simple sense of balance. ~ William Gibson,

795:Sometimes, when she rode hard, when she could really proj, Chevette got free of everything: the city, her body, even time. That was the messenger’s high, she knew, and though it felt like freedom, it was really the melding-with, the clicking-in, that did it. The bike between her legs was like some hyper-evolved alien tail she’d somehow extruded, as though over patient centuries; a sweet and intricate bone-machine, grown Lexan-armored tires, near-frictionless bearings, and gas-filled shocks. She was entirely part of the city, then, one wild-ass little dot of energy and matter, and she made her thousand choices, instant to instant, according to how the traffic flowed, how rain glinted on the street-car tracks, how a secretary’s mahogany hair fell like grace itself, exhausted, to the shoulders of her loden coat. ~ William Gibson,

796:And of course anyone who could see him here now, with his fever and his sleeping bags, his eyephones and his cellular data port and his bottle of cooling piss, would think he was crazy too. But he isn’t. He knows he isn’t, in spite of everything. He has the syndrome now, the thing that came after every test subject from that Gainesville orphanage, but he isn’t crazy. Just obsessed. And the obsession has its own shape in his head, its own texture, its own weight. He knows it from himself, can differentiate, so he goes back to it whenever he needs to and checks on it. Monitors it. Makes sure it still isn’t him. It reminds him of having a sore tooth, or the way he felt once when he was in love and didn’t want to be. How his tongue always found the tooth, or how he’d always find that ache, that absence in the shape of the beloved. But ~ William Gibson,

797:The Matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games,' said the voice-over, 'in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks.' On the Sony, a two-dimensional space war faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the spatial possibilities of logarithmic spirals; cold blue military footage burned through, lab animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire control circuits of tanks and war planes. 'Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... 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,

798:A Belgian journalist, struggling to describe the scene, had said that it resembled a cross between a permanent mass wake, an ongoing grad night for at least a dozen subcultures unheard of before the disaster, the black market cafes of occupied Paris, and Goya's idea of a dance party (assuming Goya had been Japanese and smoked freebase methamphetamine, which along with endless quantities of alcohol was clearly the Western World's substance of choice). It was, the Belgian said, as though the city, in its convolsion and grief, had spontaneously and necessarily generated this hidden pocket universe of the soul, its few unbroken windows painted over with black rubber aquarium paint. There would be no view of the ruptured city. As the reconstruction began around it, it had already become a benchmark in Tokyo's psychic history, an open secret, an urban legend. ~ William Gibson,

799:Drift. Down through deltas of former girlfriends, degrees of confirmation of girlfriendhood, personal sightings of Rez or Lo together with whichever woman in whatever public place, each account illuminated with the importance the event had held for whoever had posted it. This being for Laney the most peculiar aspect of this data, the perspective in which these two loomed. Human in every detail but then not so. Everything scrupulously, fanatically accurate, probably, but always assembled around the hollow armature of celebrity. He could see celebrity here, not like Kathy’s idea of a primal substance, but as a paradoxical quality inherent in the substance of the world. He saw that the quantity of data accumulated here by the band’s fans was much greater than everything the band themselves had ever generated. And their actual art, the music and the videos, was the merest fragment of that. ~ William Gibson,

800:Roppongi is an interzone, the land of gaijin bars, always up late. I’m waiting at a pedestrian crossing when I see her. She’s probably Australian, young and quite serviceably beautiful. She wears very expensive, very sheer black undergarments, and little else, save for some black outer layer—equally sheer, skintight, and micro-short—and some gold and diamonds to give potential clients the right idea. She steps past me, into four lanes of traffic, conversing on her phone in urgent Japanese. Traffic halts obediently for this triumphantly jaywalking gaijin in her black suede spikes. I watch her make the opposite curb, the brain-cancer deflector on her slender little phone swaying in counterpoint to her hips. When the light changes, I cross, and watch her high-five a bouncer who looks like Oddjob in a Paul Smith suit, his skinny lip beard razored with micrometer precision. There’s a flash of white as their palms meet. Folded paper. Junkie origami. ~ William Gibson,

801:No," said Blackwell, "she won't, because that would be a violation of the very personal terms I will have established in our conversation. That's the key word here, Laney, 'personal.' 'Up close, and.' We will not meet, we will not carve out this deep and meaningful and bloody unforgettable episode of mutual face-time as representatives of our respective faceless corporations. Not at all. It's one-on-one time for your Kathy and I, and it may well prove to be as intimate, and I may hope enlightening, as any she ever had. Because I will bring a new certainty into her life, and we all need certainties. They help build character. And I will leave your Kathy with the deepest possible conviction that if she crosses me, she will die-but only after she's been made to desire that, absolutely." And Black-well's smile, then, giving Laney the full benefit of his dental prosthesis, was hideous. "Now how was it exactly you were supposed to contact her, to give her your decision? ~ William Gibson,

802:Do you always wear Malaysian imitations of Brooks Brothers blue oxford button-downs, Mr. Laney?"

Laney had looked down at his shirt, or tried to.

"Malaysia?"

"The stitch-count's dead on, but they still haven't mastered the thread-tension."

"Oh."

"Never mind. A little prototypic nerd chic could actually lend a certain frisson, around here. You could lose the tie, though. Definitely lose the tie. And keep a collection of felt-tipped pens in your pocket. Unchewed, please. Plus one of those fat flat highlighters, in a really nasty fluorescent shade."

"Are you joking?"

"Probably, Mr. Laney. May I call you Colin?"

"Yes."

She never did call him "Colin," then or ever. "You'll find that humor is essential at Slitscan, Laney. A necessary survival tool. You'll find the type that's most viable here is fairly oblique."

"How do you mean, Ms. Torrance?"

"Kathy. I mean difficult to quote effectively in a memo. Or a court of law. ~ William Gibson,

803:He closed his eyes.
Found the ridged face of the power stud.
And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiled in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like a film compiled of random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.
Please, he prayed, now-
A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.
Now-
Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding-
And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of the military systems, forever beyond his reach.
And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face. ~ William Gibson,

804:He got up. The Kitchen Korner, sensing him, woke. The fridge door slid aside. A single ancient leaf of lettuce sagged blackly through the plastic rods of one white shelf. A half-empty bottle of Evian on another. He held his cupped hands hands above the lettuce, willing himself to feel something radiating from its decay, some subtle life force, orgones, particles of an energy unknown to science.
Alison Shires was going to kill herself. He knew he'd seen it. Seen it somehow in the incidental data she generated in her mild-mannered passage through the world of things.
"Hey there," the fridge said. "You've left me open."
Laney said nothing.
"Well, do you 'want' the door open, partner? You know it interferes with the automatic 'de'-frost..."
"Be quiet. " His hands felt better. Cooler.
He stood there until his hands were quite cold, then withdrew them and pressed the tips of his fingers against his temples, the fridge taking this opportunity to close itself without further comment. ~ William Gibson,

805:He slotted some ice, connected the construct, and jacked in. It was exactly the sensation of someone reading over his shoulder. He coughed.
"Dix? McCoy? That you man?"
His throat was tight.
"Hey, bro," said a directionless voice.
"It's Case, man. Remember?"
"Miami, joeboy, quick study."
"What's the last thing you remember before I spoke to you, Dix?"
"Nothin'."
"Hang on."
He disconnected the construct. The presence was gone. He reconnected it.
"Dix? Who am I?"
"You got me hung, Jack. Who the fuck are you?"
"Ca--your buddy. Partner. What's happening, man?"
"Good question."
"Remember me being here, a second ago?"
"No."
"Know how a ROM personality construct works?"
"Sure, bro, it's a firmware construct."
"So I jack it into the bank I'm using, I can give it sequential real-time memory?"
"Guess so," said the construct.
"Okay, Dix,. You are a ROM construct. Got me?"
"If you say so," said the construct. "Who are you?"
"Case."
"Miami," said the voice, "joeboy, quick study. ~ William Gibson,

806:system. At 12:04:03, every screen in the building strobed for eighteen seconds in a frequency that produced seizures in a susceptible segment of Sense/Net employees. Then something only vaguely like a human face filled the screens, its features stretched across asymmetrical expanses of bone like some obscene Mercator projection. Blue lips parted wetly as the twisted, elongated jaw moved. Something, perhaps a hand, a thing like a reddish clump of gnarled roots, fumbled toward the camera, blurred, and vanished. Subliminally rapid images of contamination: graphics of the building’s water supply system, gloved hands manipulating laboratory glassware, something tumbling down into darkness, a pale splash. . . . The audio track, its pitch adjusted to run at just less than twice the standard playback speed, was part of a month-old newscast detailing potential military uses of a substance known as HsG, a biochemical governing the human skeletal growth factor. Overdoses of HsG threw certain bone cells into overdrive, accelerating growth by factors as high as one thousand percent. ~ William Gibson,

807:`No. Stay, doesn't matter.' He settled the black terry sweatband across his forehead, careful not to disturb the flat Sendai dermatrodes [1]. He stared at the deck on his lap, not really seeing it, seeing instead the shop window on Ninsei, the chromed shuriken burning with reflected neon. He glanced up; on the wall, just above the Sony, he'd hung her gift, tacking it there with a yellow-headed drawing pin through the hole at its center.

He closed his eyes.

Found the ridged face of the power stud.

And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames.

Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.

Please, he prayed, now --

A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.

Now --

Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding --And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach. ~ William Gibson, Neuromancer,

808:She answered him by reaching back, between his thighs, and gently encircling his scrotum with thumb and forefinger. She rocked there for a minute in the dark, erect above him, her other hand on his neck. The leather of her jeans creaked softly with the movement. Case shifted, feeling himself harden against the temperfoam. His head throbbed, but the brittleness in his neck seemed to retreat. He raised himself on one elbow, rolled, sank back against the foam, pulling her down, licking her breasts, small hard nipples sliding wet across his cheek. He found the zip on the leather jeans and tugged it down. “It’s okay,” she said, “I can see.” Sound of the jeans peeling down. She struggled beside him until she could kick them away. She threw a leg across him and he touched her face. Unexpected hardness of the implanted lenses. “Don’t,” she said, “fingerprints.” Now she straddled him again, took his hand, and closed it over her, his thumb along the cleft of her buttocks, his fingers spread across the labia. As she began to lower herself, the images came pulsing back, the faces, fragments of neon arriving and receding. She slid down around him and his back arched convulsively. She rode him that way, impaling herself, slipping down on him again and again, until they both had come, his orgasm flaring blue in a timeless space, a vastness like the matrix, where the faces were shredded and blown away down hurricane corridors, and her inner thighs were strong and wet against his hips. O ~ William Gibson,

809:Twenty-three D," he said, as a boarding-pass spooled from a different slot. He pulled her passport out and handed it to her, along with her ticket and the boarding pass. "Gate fifty-two, blue concourse. Checking anything?"
"No."
"Passengers who've cleared security may be subject to noninvasive DNA sampling," he said, the words all run together because he was only saying it because it was the law that he had to.
She put her passport and ticket away in the special pocket inside her parka. She kept the boarding pass in her hand. She went looking for the blue concourse. She had to go downstairs to find it, and take one of those trains that was like an elevator that ran sideways. Half an hour later she was through security, looking at the seals they'd put on the zippers of her carry-on. They looked like rings of rubbery red candy. She hadn't expected them to do that; she'd thought she could find a pay-station in the departure lounge, link up, and give the club an update. They never sealed her carry-on when she went to Vancouver to stay with her uncle, but that wasn't really international, not since the Agreement.
She was riding a rubber sidewalk toward Gate 52 when she saw the blue light flashing, up ahead. Soldiers there, and a little barricade. The soldiers were lining people up as they came off the sidewalk. They wore fatigues and didn't seem much older than the guys at her last school.
"Shit," she heard the woman in front of her say, a big-haired blond with obvious extensions woven in. ~ William Gibson,

810:A nation,” he heard himself say, “consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual’s morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation’s laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn’t a nation.” He opened his eyes and confirmed Brown there, his partially disassembled pistol in his hand. The cleaning, lubrication, and examination of the gun’s inner workings was ritual, conducted every few nights, though as far as Milgrim knew, Brown hadn’t fired the gun since they’d been together. “What did you say?” “Are you really so scared of terrorists that you’ll dismantle the structures that made America what it is?” Milgrim heard himself ask this with a sense of deep wonder. He was saying these things without consciously having thought them, or at least not in such succinct terms, and they seemed inarguable. “The fuck—” “If you are, you let the terrorist win. Because that is exactly, specifically, his goal, his only goal: to frighten you into surrendering the rule of law. That’s why they call him ‘terrorist.’ He uses terrifying threats to induce you to degrade your own society.” Brown opened his mouth. Closed it. “It’s based on the same glitch in human psychology that allows people to believe they can win the lottery. Statistically, almost nobody ever wins the lottery. Statistically, terrorist attacks almost never happen.” There was a look on Brown’s face that Milgrim hadn’t seen there before. Now Brown tossed a fresh bubble-pack down on the bedspread. “Good night,” Milgrim heard himself say, still insulated by the silver membrane. Brown turned, walking silently back into his own room in his stocking feet, the partial pistol in his hand. Milgrim raised his right arm toward the ceiling, straight up, ~ William Gibson,

811:What happened to your arm?" she asked me one night in the Gentleman Loser, the three of us drinking at a small table in a corner.

Hang-gliding," I said, "accident."

Hang-gliding over a wheatfield," said Bobby, "place called Kiev. Our Jack's just hanging there in the dark, under a Nightwing parafoil, with fifty kilos of radar jammed between his legs, and some Russian asshole accidentally burns his arm off with a laser."

I don't remember how I changed the subject, but I did.

I was still telling myself that it wasn't Rikki who getting to me, but what Bobby was doing with her. I'd known him for a long time, since the end of the war, and I knew he used women as counters in a game, Bobby Quine versus fortune, versus time and the night of cities. And Rikki had turned up just when he needed something to get him going, something to aim for. So he'd set her up as a symbol for everything he wanted and couldn't have, everything he'd had and couldn't keep.

I didn't like having to listen to him tell me how much he loved her, and knowing he believed it only made it worse. He was a past master at the hard fall and the rapid recovery, and I'd seen it happen a dozen times before. He might as well have had next printed across his sunglasses in green Day-Glo capitals, ready to flash out at the first interesting face that flowed past the tables in the Gentleman Loser.

I knew what he did to them. He turned them into emblems, sigils on the map of his hustler' s life, navigation beacons he could follow through a sea of bars and neon. What else did he have to steer by? He didn't love money, in and of itself , not enough to follow its lights. He wouldn't work for power over other people; he hated the responsibility it brings. He had some basic pride in his skill, but that was never enough to keep him pushing.

So he made do with women.

When Rikki showed up, he needed one in the worst way. He was fading fast, and smart money was already whispering that the edge was off his game. He needed that one big score, and soon, because he didn't know any other kind of life, and all his clocks were set for hustler's time, calibrated in risk and adrenaline and that supernal dawn calm that comes when every move's proved right and a sweet lump of someone else's credit clicks into your own account. ~ William Gibson,

812:think of climate change as slow, but it is unnervingly fast. We think of the technological change necessary to avert it as fast-arriving, but unfortunately it is deceptively slow—especially judged by just how soon we need it. This is what Bill McKibben means when he says that winning slowly is the same as losing: “If we don’t act quickly, and on a global scale, then the problem will literally become insoluble,” he writes. “The decisions we make in 2075 won’t matter.” Innovation, in many cases, is the easy part. This is what the novelist William Gibson meant when he said, “The future is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed.” Gadgets like the iPhone, talismanic for technologists, give a false picture of the pace of adaptation. To a wealthy American or Swede or Japanese, the market penetration may seem total, but more than a decade after its introduction, the device is used by less than 10 percent of the world; for all smartphones, even the “cheap” ones, the number is somewhere between a quarter and a third. Define the technology in even more basic terms, as “cell phones” or “the internet,” and you get a timeline to global saturation of at least decades—of which we have two or three, in which to completely eliminate carbon emissions, planetwide. According to the IPCC, we have just twelve years to cut them in half. The longer we wait, the harder it will be. If we had started global decarbonization in 2000, when Al Gore narrowly lost election to the American presidency, we would have had to cut emissions by only about 3 percent per year to stay safely under two degrees of warming. If we start today, when global emissions are still growing, the necessary rate is 10 percent. If we delay another decade, it will require us to cut emissions by 30 percent each year. This is why U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres believes we have only one year to change course and get started. The scale of the technological transformation required dwarfs any achievement that has emerged from Silicon Valley—in fact dwarfs every technological revolution ever engineered in human history, including electricity and telecommunications and even the invention of agriculture ten thousand years ago. It dwarfs them by definition, because it contains all of them—every single one needs to be replaced at the root, since every single one breathes on carbon, like a ventilator. ~ David Wallace Wells,

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