William Gibson
You can get in a cab in Vancouver and the 20-year-old driver speaks more knowingly of Michael Ovitz than anyone in the industry. They just know! And it's perhaps not unhealthy.Collection: Years
The nature of emergent technology is, as Kevin Kelly once said, right out of control. It's an element of human evolution that's completely out of control. It's sort of driving itself, and I don't see it ceasing to do that.Collection: Technology
Damien is a friend. Their boy-girl Lego doesn't click, he would say.Collection: Girl
There's an idea called "gray man", in the security business, that I find interesting. They teach people to dress unobtrusively. Chinos instead of combat pants, and if you really need the extra pockets, a better design conceals them. They assume, actually, that the bad guys will shoot all the guys wearing combat pants first, just to be sure.Collection: Men
Twitter is the only brand of social media that I have ever taken to at all. I like the feeling of having my perception of the world expanded daily, 24/7, by being able to monitor the reactions of 100-and-some people throughout the world that I personally follow so I have some sense of who they are. There has never really been anything like that before, at least in terms of the digestible 140-character bandwidth that Twitter is based on. I am able to wake up, open Twitter, and sort of glance across the psychic state of the planet.Collection: Taken
The designers [of the 1930s] were populists, you see; they were trying to give the public what it wanted. What the public wanted was the future.Collection: Giving
It seems as though everyone is going to the currency of celebrity. Everyone's getting their own account of whatever that currency is. That's something neat.Collection: Currency
What strikes me about Toronto is that Toronto's great misfortune was to have too much money in the late 70s and early 80s, and consequently, it built in the style of those periods, which is hideous.Collection: Style
A lot of the buildings [in Toronto] around Yonge and Bloor is the architectural equivalent of Kipper Ties and 8" collar points. It's ghastly and no amount of street-level retail glitz can lift it.Collection: Ties
Somehow I think that if Toronto had been forced to wait a decade [from 80th], it would be a better looking city.Collection: Thinking
[I've gone to big stadium rock concerts at some artist's invitation], and eventually you find yourself in the room with the Radiant Being around whom all this is revolving. It's very bizarre, and it's quasi-religious, or possibly genuinely religious. Spooky. It's a spooky and interesting thing.Collection: Religious
I think that the collectible ephemera craze/awareness is probably driven by a reverse market, rebounding off the sense of everything being mass-produced. It's the last step you take in trying to find something unique.Collection: Unique
I've never actually been a collector. I like the learning-curve, but I buy things, sell them to finance other things.Collection: Curves
Art Deco for me except in its most crazed and attenuated forms, it's jut a matter of taste.Collection: Art
I worry about what we'll do in the future, [about the instantaneous co-opting of pop culture]. Where is our new stuff going to come from?Collection: Worry
I can see television much more easily than I can see features, because the economy and politics of making big, big features seems to me to be narrowing even from what it was.Collection: Television
I watch a sort of primitive form of the recommodification machine around my friends and myself in sixties, and it took about two years for this clumsy mechanism to get and try to sell us The Monkees. In 1977, it took about eight months for a slightly faster more refined mechanism to put punk in the window of Holt Renfrew. It's gotten faster ever since. The scene in Seattle that Nirvana came from: as soon as it had a label, it was on the runways of Paris.There's no grace period, so that's a way in which I see us losing the interstitial.Collection: Eight
I have always been intensely uncomfortable with the idea of a science fiction writer as prophet. Not that there haven't been science fiction writers who think of themselves as having some sort of prophetic role, but when I think of that, I always think of H.G. Wells - he would think of what was going to happen, and he would imagine how it would happen, and then he would create a fiction to illustrate the idea that he'd had. And no part of my process has ever resembled that at all.Collection: Thinking
Magazines in the traditional sense were aggregators of novelty. A good magazine was a lot of novelty, stuff you've never heard of before, clearly aggregated by people who have been able to travel further and dig deeper than you have been able to do. And that used to be really an important source of stuff for me. And now it is less important because the Internet has eaten it all up. But my Twitter feed as an aggregator of novelty is like... I don't know what I would do if it became any more powerful, I would have to start reining it in somehow.Collection: Powerful
It was hot, the night we burned Chrome.Collection: Night
The prefix cyber is going the way of the prefix electro.Collection: Way
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.Collection: Real
Movies have gotten dull, the way network television got dull. And television, if we can still even call it that, is still really exciting and riveting and people are totally into it. I am always meeting people who have these favorite shows that they are completely wired too and not only have I never seen it but I don't even know how to find it.Collection: People
She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.Collection: Moving
Three in the morning. Making yourself a cup of coffee in the dark, using a flashlight when you pour the boiling water.Collection: Morning
I've always assumed from the beginning that I had relatively few contemporaries among my readership. Not that I was consciously writing for a younger audience but that what I was doing interested a younger audience, or at least threatened them less.Collection: Writing
I look at [Toronto] and think well, perhaps my grandchildren will someday look at this stuff with the sort of appreciation I once held for Art Deco. Although I've come to find Art Deco quite creepy too.Collection: Appreciation
I feel like I've been very fortunate in that I've stuck like a burr to the dog-leg of the next generation of nerdism. I've been carried into the XXIth century on Bill Gates' pants-cuff.Collection: Dog
I suppose I do the Japanese because I just don't know China. Chinese popular culture has never evoked that instant of, "Whoah! What's that?" that I have with Japanese popular culture.Collection: Chinese
When did it become necessary to explain what's so cool about Japan? Everyone was quite obsessed with it 15 years ago. I suppose it's the only Asian country that developed an imaginary entree to me. That's why I go back.Collection: Country
I was once really close to sitting down and having a conversation with a shadowy young woman who is reputed have become a millionaire by investing in Beanie Babies. She was someone that a couple people claimed to know, she seemed to exist, but she remained shadowy.Collection: Baby
For me, the melancholy of the late XXth Century is walking late at night by the Mont Blanc pen store and seeing these things always strike me as simulacra of luxury items. They seem like fakes.Collection: Night
Every shop in every High Street in Europe is filled with basically the same stuff. There's a street in every city of the world that has a Gap and Benneton's, and the upscale versions of those.Collection: Europe
I probably had something to do with being southern. For some reason, over the last few years I've been much more conscious of that. It's probably because my friend Jack Womack has a thesis that he and I write the way we do because we're southern and we experienced the very tail end of the premeditated south.Collection: Writing
There's violence in my culture [from America's South].Collection: America
I loved the Limey [movie]! It's so violent! And yet it's so exquisitely romanticized in a sort of Japanese way, it's a samurai film. Coming out of that, I was really deeply conflicted, because a friend who had seen it said, it's beautiful, but it's not about anything. it's one micron thick.Collection: Beautiful
To some extent I'm guilty of wishful thinking. The absence of the interstitial I find unbearable.Collection: Thinking
Hollis thought he looked like William Burroughs, minus the bohemian substrate (or perhaps the methadone). Like someone who'd be invited quail shooting with the vice-president, though too careful to get himself shot.Collection: President
If someone comes in and says, "What are you doing," if I'm honest, the answer is, "I don't know. But I'm doing THIS, don't know why."Collection: Answers
All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he'd cut in Night City, and still he'd see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void.Collection: Taken
Friday, August 04, 2006 MONUMENT posted 8:31 AM Silver nitrous girls pointed into occult winds of porn and destiny.Collection: Girl
You could have sex relatively comfortably on a platform of books, but not on a platform of PDA.s. Hardcover books. Paperbacks might start sliding around. Though I.d still prefer paperbacks to a pile of PDA.s.Collection: Sex
I don't think about the real future very much.Collection: Real
The construct of William Gibson the Writer is coming down, and become more open. It's more of a Glasnost - Transparency! Transparency is what it is.Collection: Down And
I think that I've always written about things that are very personal, but initially, I coded everything.Collection: Thinking
I have this prejudice that trilogies are long, three-volume novels.Collection: Long
Television has - particularly at the HBO level in the United States - become a completely new genre. Something like Deadwood or The Wire is a whole new thing - there was no equivalent to that medium before. It's like a new way of telling stories.Collection: Hbo
If I meet someone and discover that they're an absolute, very earnest nationalist, it's unlikely that I'm going to get much closer to them. I don't understand them. It doesn't matter where they're from, I just don't get it. I'm a multi-national kind of guy.Collection: Guy
The culture is still there, and people are still doing it. I imagine some people are doing it very well indeed. As for me, it definitely was my native literary culture. Science fiction was where I'm from, but on the way to now, I went through a lot of other territory, and I wasn't really that culturally conventional an SF writer when I started.Collection: People