Quotes from William Gibson

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

Cultural Marxism was what other people called political correctness, according to Brown, but it was really cultural Marxism, and had come to the United States from Germany, after World War II, in the cunning skulls of a clutch of youngish professors from Frankfurt. The Frankfurt School, as they'd called themselves, had wasted no time in plunging their intellectual ovipositors repeatedly into the unsuspecting body of old-school American academia.

The lane to the land of the dead. Where you are, my friend. Marie-France, my lady, she prepared this road, but her lord choked her off before I could read the book of her days. Neuro from the nerves, the silver paths. Romancer. Necromancer. I call up the dead. But no, my friend, and the boy did a little dance, brown feet printing the sand, I am the dead, and their land. He laughed. A gull cried, Stay. If your woman is a ghost, she doesn't know it. Neither will you. Neuromancer

We're all doing VR, every time we look at a screen. We have been for decades now. We just do it. We didn't need the goggles, the gloves. It just happened.

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.

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?

Statistically, almost nobody ever wins the lottery. Statistically, terrorist attacks almost never happen.

If there's anything better, God kept it for himself.

CYBERSPACE, AS THE deck presented it, had no particular relationship with the deck's physical whereabouts. When Case jacked in, he opened his eyes to the familiar configuration of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority's Aztec pyramid of data.

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.

It's about atemporality. About opting out of the industrialization of novelty. It's about deeper code.

Algorithms are called the aunties. They're self-organising and so nobody fully understands them.

It's more the way it is now than it's ever been

Opportunities to do very badly were manifold. You avoided them. The major part in any success.

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

The room was empty, aside from the wide pink bedslab and two nylon bags, new and identical, that lay beside it. Blank walls, no windows, a single white-painted steel firedoor. The walls were coated with countless layers of white latex paint. Factory space. He knew this kind of room, this kind of building; the tenants would operate in the interzone where art wasn't quite crime, crime not quite art.

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.

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

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.

How were they weird?" "Hoodoos. Thought the matrix was full of mambos 'n' shit. Wanna know something, Moll?" "What?" "They're right.

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?

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.

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.

Those fuckers," Janice said, meaning the football players, "they get me doing hate Kegels.