Quotes from William Gibson

THE MATRIX HAS its roots in primitive arcade games," said the voice-over, "in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks.

I spent the war in Lisbon, you know," Deane said, putting the gun down. "Lovely place, Lisbon.

Cyberspace slid into existence from the cardinal points. Smooth, he thought, but not smooth enough.

The low, vaulted hallway was lined with dozens of museum cases, archaic-looking glass-fronted boxes made of brown wood. They looked awkward there, against the organic curves of the hallway's walls, as though they'd been brought in and set up in a line for some forgotten purpose. Dull brass fixtures held globes of white light at ten-meter intervals. The floor was uneven, and ... carpets had been put down at random. In some places, they were six deep, the floor a soft patchwork of handwoven wool.

But the paneled room folded itself through a dozen impossible angles, tumbling away into cyberspace like an origami crane.

He found himself wondering about the mind he shared these sensations with. What did he know about her?

UN's got deep roots in the demonology.

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.

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.

But I don't trust that some last convulsive urge to short-term profit, some terminal shortsightedness, mightn't bring an end to everything.

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

entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly.

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.

romanticizing pathology

People are more scared of how complicated shit actually is than they ever are about whatever's supposed to be behind the conspiracy.

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 Ã¢â'¬Â¦

In the non-space of the matrix, the interior of a given data construct possessed unlimited subjective dimension; a child's toy calculator, accessed through Case's Sendai, would have presented limitless gulfs of nothingness hung with a few basic commands.

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;

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.

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?

I want to have my cake and eat it too.

It would be more accurate, in terms of the mythform, to say that the matrix has a God, since this being's omniscience and omnipresence are assumed to be limited to the matrix.

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.

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.