William Gibson
Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description, as science writers, but there are bad dreams as well as good dreams. We're dreamers, you see, but we're also realists, of a sort.Collection: Science
I like the idea of people who've had some success in one form secretly wanting to be something else; I have some of that myself. I look for it in other people who've established themselves in some particular art form, and then you find out that they really would like to design running shoes, or edit literary magazines or something.Collection: Design
The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet.Collection: Wisdom
Time moves in one direction, memory in another.Collection: Time
I didn't have a manifesto. I had some discontent. It seemed to me that midcentury mainstream American science fiction had often been triumphalist and militaristic, a sort of folk propaganda for American exceptionalism.Collection: Science
I've never really been very interested in computers themselves. I don't watch them; I watch how people behave around them. That's becoming more difficult to do because everything is around them.Collection: Computers
I would like to design what people generally call streetwear. I'd like to dress skateboarders, or whatever the older equivalent of skateboarders are. I pay more attention to that stuff than anyone would ever imagine because I'm watching what the designers do.Collection: Design
I'm interested in how people all over the world array themselves and go forth in the morning to do whatever they have to do to make a living.Collection: Morning
The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it.Collection: Technology
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts.Collection: Technology
If you make something, it's an artifact. It's something that somebody or some corporate entity has caused to come into being. A great many human beings have thought about each of the artifacts that surround us. Different degrees of intelligence and attention have been brought to bear on anything.Collection: Intelligence
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.Collection: Technology
It's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information.Collection: Technology
I started with Apple, in a pre-Windows era when PCs seemed to involve more of a learning curve. But the fact that I'm yet to acquire so much as a single virus still seems a very good thing.Collection: Learning
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.
Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead station.
A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my own career want list. That label enabled mainstream science fiction to safely assimilate our dissident influence, such as it was. Cyberpunk could then be embraced and given prizes and patted on the head, and genre science fiction could continue unchanged.
'Cyberspace' as a term is sort of over. It's over in the way that, after a certain time, people stopped using the suffix '-electro' to make things cool, because everything was electrical. 'Electro' was all over the early 20th century, and now it's gone. I think 'cyber' is sort of the same way.
For years I have been mourning and not for my dead, it is for this boy for whatever corner in my heart died when his childhood slid out of my arms.
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.
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'.
The ecological impact of book manufacture and traditional book marketing - I think that should really be considered. We have this industry in which we cut down trees to make the paper that we then use enormous amounts of electricity to turn into books that weigh a great deal and are then shipped enormous distances to point-of-sale retail.
And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.
I don't think nostalgia is a healthy modality. But nostalgia and a sense of history are not the same thing. Nostalgia is a dysfunction of the historical impulse, or a corruption of the historical impulse.
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.
The history of the past, a hundred years from now, won't be the history of the past that we learned in school because much more will have been revealed, and adjectives we can't even imagine will have been brought to bear on what we did learn in school.
Science fiction writers aren't fortune tellers. Fortune tellers are fakes.
The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience.
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.
If you've read a lot of vintage science fiction, as I have at one time or another in my life, you can't help but realise how wrong we get it. I have gotten it wrong more times than I've gotten it right. But I knew that when I started; I knew that before I wrote a word of science fiction.
Gadgets are usually the last thing I think about, and if there's something new, I'll get to the store for the final shipment of the first generation when it's on sale. So I have last year's stuff.
I guess Twitter is the first thing that has been attractive to me as social media. I never felt the least draw to Facebook or MySpace. I've been involved anonymously in some tiny listservs, mainly in my ceaseless quest for random novelty, and sometimes while doing something that more closely resembles research.
My dream scenario would be that you could go into a bookshop, examine copies of every book in print that they're able to offer, then for a fee have them produce in a minute or two a beautiful finished copy in a dust jacket that you would pay for and take home.
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.
I'm not a computer guy. I'm like an anthropologist. I'm fascinated with people's obsessions. I've learned to wear them.
Generation X is dead. It has come to mean anyone aged 13 to 55 years old.
I've become convinced that nostalgia is a fundamentally unhealthy modality. When you see it, it's usually attached to something else that's really, seriously bad. I don't traffic in nostalgia. We're becoming a global culture.
I'm happiest with people who've gotten furthest from traditional ideas of nationalism.
I don't have to write about the future. For most people, the present is enough like the future to be pretty scary.
I'm a reluctant writer of non-fiction, in part because I don't really feel qualified.
I grew up in southwestern Virginia. I was born in South Carolina, but only because my parents had a vacation cabin or something there on the beach. I was like a summer baby. But I did grow up in the South. I grew up in serious, serious Appalachia, in a very small town.
I'd always maintained that much of the anarchy and craziness of the early Internet had a lot to do with the fact that governments just hadn't realised it was there.
I think the large part of the function of the Internet is it is archival. It's unreliable to the extent that word on the street is unreliable. It's no more unreliable than that. You can find the truth on the street if you work at it. I don't think of the Internet or the virtual as being inherently inferior to the so-called real.
I find it interesting to see people - mostly people who are younger than I am - going to considerable trouble to try to reproduce things from an era that was far more physical, from a less virtual day.
I was afraid to watch 'Blade Runner' in the theater because I was afraid the movie would be better than what I myself had been able to imagine. In a way, I was right to be afraid, because even the first few minutes were better.
Why shouldn't we give our teachers a license to obtain software, all software, any software, for nothing? Does anyone demand a licensing fee, each time a child is taught the alphabet?
I think with one exception I've never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed.
I don't begin a novel with a shopping list - the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it.
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.