Quotes from William Gibson

I think with one exception I've never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed.

I try to be objective about technology. Agnostic, in a sense. Whatever personal opinions I form tend to have more to do with what we find to do with the new thing.

Futurists get to a certain age and, as one does, they suddenly recognize their own mortality.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation.

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.

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

Wonderful, the Flatline said, I never did like to do anything simple when I could do it ass-backwards.

Because people who couldn't imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn't need to imagine, because they already were.

Don't let the little fuckers generation gap you.

To present a whole world that doesn't exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we're polymaths. That's just the act of all good writing.

You needed a new pancreas. The one we bought for you frees you from a dangerous dependency." "Thanks, but I was enjoying that dependency.

A nation," he heard himself say, "consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual's morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation's laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn't a nation.

I took Punk to be the detonation of some slow-fused projectile buried deep in society's flank a decade earlier, and I took it to be, somehow, a sign.

The future is there, Cayce hears herself say, looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.

Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the result. Handles. Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves.

Laney had recently noticed that the only people who had titles that clearly described their jobs had jobs he wouldn't have wanted.

Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky.

That's something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: The most interesting applications turn up on a battlefield, or in a gallery.

You know what your trouble is? You're the kind who always reads the handbook. Anything people build, any kind of technology, it's going to have some specific purpose. It's for doing something that somebody already understands. But if it's new technology, it'll open areas nobody's ever thought of before. You read the manual, man, and you won't play around with it, not the same way. And you get all funny when somebody else uses it to do something you never thought of.

Friday, August 04, 2006 MONUMENT posted 8:31 AM Silver nitrous girls pointed into occult winds of porn and destiny.

Damien is a friend. Their boy-girl Lego doesn't click, he would say.

It was hot, the night we burned Chrome.

Are you - are you sad? - No. But your - your songs are sad. - My songs are of time and distance. The sadness is in you. Watch my arms. There is only the dance. These things you treasure are shells.

Cliches became cliches for a reason; that they usually hold at least a modicum of truth, and the following cliche is truer than most: You can't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been.