Quotes from William Gibson

I'm a really good eavesdropper. I listen to what people say and remember all the buzzwords.

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.

The people I hang out with tend to use Macs, not that I think they're necessarily superior.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed. The Economist, December 4, 2003

The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it.

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.

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

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

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.

Virtual Reality is like mainlining television.

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

The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed. The Economist, December 4, 2003

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

When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.

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...

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

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

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.

The street finds its own uses for things.