Quotes from William Gibson

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system.

Yeah, it's so popular it's almost legal. The customers are torn between needing someone and wanting to be alone at the same time, which has probably always been the name of that particular game, even before we had the neuroelectronics to enable them to have it both ways.

Fables from before the Anaheiming.

Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.

Now the deer moved through snow, snow that blew sideways, frosting the perfectly upright walls of Detroit's dead and monumental heart, vast black tines of brick reaching up to vanish in the white sky. They made a lot of nature shows there.

That evil wasn't glamorous, but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room, however that might happen, to become its bigger self. Bigger, with more horrible results, but never more than the cumulative weight of ordinary human baseness.

You can't get clever men to fight such a system, as it makes too much sense to 'em.

There are tumults of the mind, when, like the great convulsions of Nature, all seems anarchy and returning chaos; yet often, in those moments of vast disturbance, as in the strife of Nature itself, some new principle of order, or some new impulse of conduct, develops itself, and controls, and regulates, and brings to an harmonious consequence, passions and elements which seem only to threaten despair and subversion.

A middleman's business is to make himself a necessary evil.

Her fingers found a random second stud and she was catapulted through the static wall, into cluttered vastness, the notional void of cyberspace, the bright grid of the matrix ranged around her like an infinite cage.

The factory might have given us the millionfold productivity increases that yielded the Industrial Revolution, but it achieved those gains by chaining us to machines, deskilling the artisan and turning him into a cog in the factory, stripped of judgment and dignity and disconnected from the rhythms of his spirit and the world around him.

The pop star, as we knew her – and here he bowed slightly, in her direction – was actually an artefact of preubiquitous media. Of -? Of a state in which 'mass' media existed, if you will, within the world. As opposed to? Comprising it.

Seated each afternoon in the darkened screening room, Halliday came to recognise the targeted numerals of the Academy leader as sigils preceding the dream state of a film.

I felt like a punk who'd gone out to buy a switchblade and come home with a small neutron bomb. Screwed again, I thought. What good's a neutron bomb in a streetfight?

That's what money will buy you, in America," Brown had said, firmly. "People say Americans are materialistic. But do you know why?" "Why?" asked Milgrim, more concerned with this uncharacteristically expansive mode of expression on Brown's part. "Because they have better stuff," Brown had replied. "No other reason.

The nature of friendship is such that you never know who will turn out to be your friends, but once you have met them you can't imagine that you could have gone through life without ever knowing them.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. . . .

She hung up before he could say goodbye. Stood there with her arm cocked, phone at ear-level, suddenly aware of the iconic nature of her unconscious pose. Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places, that had once belong to cigarettes, now belonged to phones.

His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it.

And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.

And now it's late, close to the wolfing hour of soul-lack. But she knows, lying curled here, behind him, in the darkness of this small room, with the somehow liquid background sounds of Paris, that hers has returned, at least for the meantime, reeled entirely in on its silver thread and warmly socketed.

Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway.

The U.S. hundred is the international currency of bad shit, Hollis, and by the same token the number one target of counterfeiters.

He'd lived for so long on a constant edge of anxiety that he'd almost forgotten what real fear was.