William Gibson
I assume that - because you can get degrees in journalism from very reputable universities - I assume that people can be trained to be journalists. I've never been entirely certain that anyone can be trained to be a novelist in the same way.
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.
That's one of my favorite things about Twitter: You can tweak your feed into a fabulous novelty engine. That's only one thing you can do with it, but it's one of the things I find most entertaining about it.
I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity.
In 1981, I was a futurist - or at least I was a guy who put on a futurist hat occasionally - and I wrote about the 21st century.
All we really have when we pretend to write about the future is the moment in which we are writing. That's why every imagined future obsoletes like an ice cream melting on the way back from the corner store.
The people I hang out with tend to use Macs, not that I think they're necessarily superior.
I'm always interested in the spooky repurposing of everyday things.
If I'm practicing making up what the characters will do, it's never good. In fact, when I catch myself doing that, I try to get rid of that section, and try and let them start making the decisions.
I don't generate a storyline and then fill it out in the course of writing. The story actually generates in the course of the writing. It's one of the reasons I've never been comfortable doing screenplays, because in order to get the contract for the screenplay, you have to sit down and tell them what's going to happen.
I can't imagine writing a book without some strong female characters, unless that was a demand of the setting.
Futurists get to a certain age and, as one does, they suddenly recognize their own mortality.
I very seldom compose anything in my head which later finds its way into text, except character names sometimes - I'm often very much inspired by things that I misunderstand.
Occasionally if I look back at something I've written I'll find one of those that I don't understand, but that's a bad thing - the unconscious has dealt me a bad hand.
I think that our future has lost that capital F we used to spell it with. The science fiction future of my childhood has had a capital F - it was assumed to be an American Future because America was the future. The Future was assumed to be inherently heroic, and a lot of other things, as well.
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.
Whenever I read a contemporary literary novel that describes the world we're living in, I wait for the science fiction tools to come out. Because they have to - the material demands it.
As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair.
I'm often saddened and dismayed to see myself portrayed as either a Luddite or as a raving technophile. I've always thought that my job was to be as anthropologically neutral about emerging technologies as possible.
I don't much live my life as if I was living in a Raymond Chandler novel, which is probably a good thing.
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.
Cyberspace is colonising what we used to think of as the real world. I think that our grandchildren will probably regard the distinction we make between what we call the real world and what they think of as simply the world as the quaintest and most incomprehensible thing about us.
When I start writing a novel, I have no sense of direction, no idea, really nothing.
I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.
I've been interested in autism since I've known about it, which is more or less since I've been writing.
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 thing that 'Neuromancer' predicts as being actually like the Internet isn't actually like the Internet at all!
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.
Science fiction was one of those places, particularly during the McCarthy era, where you could write whatever you wanted because it was beneath contempt. They didn't bother censoring it.
I'm a really good eavesdropper. I listen to what people say and remember all the buzzwords.
In the early '80s, I happened to find myself in the vicinity of people who would work for Microsoft five years later.
I watch for emergent technologies and pay attention to what people say they'll be good for, then see what we actually use them for. It never occurred to me that a tiny telephone with a wireless transceiver would do whatever it is that it's done to us.
Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.Collection: Inspirational
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination.Collection: Cyberspace
Time is money, but also money is money.Collection: Time Is Money
People who feel safer with a gun than with guaranteed medical insurance don't yet have a fully adult concept of scary.Collection: Gun
When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.Collection: Engineering
The deadliest bullshit is odorless, and transparent.Collection: Bullshit
The future is there... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.Collection: Trying
The future is not Google-able.Collection: Google
I do not think an enormous permanent underclass is a very good thing to have if you're attempting to operate something that at least pretends sometimes to be a democracy.Collection: Thinking
My problem is that all things are increasingly interesting to meCollection: Interesting
We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition.Collection: Life
The present tense made him nervous.Collection: Nervous
A book exists at the intersection of the author's subconscious and the reader's response.Collection: Book
Stand high long enough and your lightning will come.Collection: Long
Our hardware is likely to turn into something like us a lot faster than we are likely to turn into something like our hardware...I very much doubt that our grandchildren will understand the distinction between that which is a computer and that which isn't.Collection: Grandchildren
If ignorance were enough to make things not exist, the world would be more like a lot of people think it is. But it's not. And it's not.Collection: Ignorance
Japan had a more radical experience of future shock than any other nation in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. They were this feudal place, locked in the past, but then they bought the whole Industrial Revolution kit from England, blew their cultural brains out with it, became the first industrialized Asian nation, tried to take over their side of the world, got nuked by the United States for their trouble, and discovered Steve McQueen! Their take on iconic menswear emerges from that matrix.Collection: Past