Quotes from William Gibson

I'm quite proud of what I anticipated about reality television from my books in the early '90s, which I based on the early seasons of 'Cops' and on the amazing stuff I had read about happening on Japanese shows and the British 'Big Brother'.

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.

The past is past, the future unformed. There is only the moment, and that is where he prefers to be.

She walked on, comforted by the surf, by the one perpetual moment of beach-time, the now-and-always of it.

Time is money, but also money is money.

If I write something set 60 years in the future, I am going to have to explain how humanity got there, and that's becoming quite a big job.

Sometimes, I can myself be frustrated by books that seem to me to be insufficiently realistic about the world's potential for just being totally a randomly bad place.

I'm a reluctant writer of non-fiction, in part because I don't really feel qualified.

In a sense, if you're not getting it wrong really a lot when you're creating imaginary futures, then you're just not doing it enough. You're not creating enough imaginary futures.

I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity.

I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity. Its record for being accurately predictive is really, really poor! If you look at the whole history of science fiction, what people have said is going to happen, what writers have said is going to happen, and what actually happened - it's terrible.

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

Science fiction writers aren't fortune tellers. Fortune tellers are fakes.

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

Sometimes, I feel like a time traveller, cause the only way that we can really travel in time is just to get older.

The Internet is part of this ongoing, species-long project we've been working on since we climbed down out of the trees in the savanna. We've been working on it without really knowing it.

When I wrote 'Neuromancer', I had a list in my head of all the things the future was assumed to be which it would not be in the book I was about to write. In a sense, I intended 'Neuromancer', among other things, to be a critique of all the aspects of science fiction that no longer satisfied me.

I'm happiest with people who've gotten furthest from traditional ideas of nationalism.

All my life I've encountered people who were obsessed with one particular class of object or experience, who were constantly pursuing that thing. Since I was a little kid, I hadn't afforded myself the opportunity, I guess, to have a hobby.

In the early '80s, I happened to find myself in the vicinity of people who would work for Microsoft five years later.

I read a great deal of science fiction with consummate pleasure between, say, the ages of 12 and 16. Then I got away from it. In my mid- to late 20s, I started trying to write it.

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

I'm embarrassed if I think anyone knows exactly what I paid for something, or even where I got it. I want what I'm wearing to feel good on, wear well, and to be extremely functional.

I think that technologies are morally neutral until we apply them. It's only when we use them for good or for evil that they become good or evil.