Quotes from William Gibson

The shortcomings of the system are best understood as the result of taking this ocean of data, and the decision points produced by our algorithms, as a near enough substitute for perfect certainty. My own best results are often due to pretending I know relatively little, and acting accordingly, though it's easier said than done. Far easier.

After she'd called for the car, they waited outside while it drove itself over.

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.

I dislike calling them stubs," Lowbeer said. "They're short because we've only just initiated them, by reaching into the past and making that first contact. We should call them branches, as they literally are.

The receptionist in the cool gray anteroom of the Galerie Duperey might well have grown there, a lovely and likely poisonous plant, rooted behind a slab of polished marble inlaid with an enameled keyboard.

he'd gone into a kind of terminal overdrive, hustling fresh capital with a cold intensity that had seemed to belong to someone else.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

When Lowbeer wished a conversation in public to be private, which she invariably did, London emptied itself around her.

her gaze had tracked the brass plaque automatically—"La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même.

nothing acquires quite as rapid or peculiar a patina of age as an imaginary future.

She rolls over, abandoning this pointless parody of sleep. Gropes for her clothes. A small boy's black Fruit Of The Loom T-shirt, thoroughly shrunken, a thin gray V-necked pullover purchased by the half-dozen from a supplier to New England prep schools, and a new and oversized pair of black 501's, every trademark carefully removed. Even the buttons on these have been ground flat, featureless, by a puzzled Korean locksmith, in the Village, a week ago.

Everything changed.

Just now she wishes lives could be replaced as easily, but knows that that isn't right. However odd things seem, mustn't it be to exactly that extent of oddness that a life is one's own, and no one else's?

The State Police car was a standard black Prius Interceptor with that origami-looking bodywork that Leon called go-faster folds.

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

Far more creativity, today, goes into the marketing of products than into the products themselves, athletic shoes or feature films.

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

few stray bits of Lego

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.

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.