Quotes from William Gibson

Neuromancer] is about the present. It's not really about an imagined future. It's a way of trying to come to terms with the awe and terror inspired […] by the world in which we live.

No, she thought, not new; the old, the always, the now and ever was.

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

All the while aware of his addiction, awakened by the flood of stress chemicals, urgently advising him that something to take the edge off would be a very good idea indeed. It was, some newer part of him thought, amazed, like having a Nazi tank buried in your back yard. Grown over with grass and dandelions, but then you noticed its engine was still idling.

She's here on Blue Ant's ticket. Relatively tiny in terms of permanent staff, globally distributed, more post-geographic than multinational, the agency has from the beginning billed itself as a high-speed, low-drag life-form in an advertising ecology of lumbering herbivores.

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.

And finally telling her story to Wilf Netherton, who'd looked like a low-key infomercial for an unnamed product.

The social and political naivete of modern corporate boffins is frightening, they read me and just take bits, all the cute technology, and miss about fifteen levels of irony.

Not sentient, yet as Lowbeer had pointed out, effortlessly anthropomorphized. An anthropomorph, really, to be disanthropomorphized.

Arleigh's van smelled like long-chain monomers and warm electronics.

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

I don't know. You might say what I am is basically defined by the fact that I don't know, because I can't know.

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.

está cambiando las cosas. Redistribuye el poder a su conveniencia. Información. Poder. Datos duros y puros. Pon la cantidad suficiente en manos de un solo hombre y...

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.

For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall.

But it looks a lot like finding the weirdest shit you can get away with in one night, in San Francisco, if you're willing to blow a metric fuck-ton of money to do it.

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.

With his hands in the pockets of his jacket, he stared through the glass at a flat lozenge of vatgrown flesh that lay on a carved pedestal of imitation jade.

I know Quine, by the way. Real asshole.

Stormin'," he said, like he was glad to note the world outside continuing on any recognizable course at all, however drastic.

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.

Something that induced a dissociative state. It was difficult to complain about a dissociative state.

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.