Quote

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.

William Gibson

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

William Gibson
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 17
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Conway
South Carolina
William Ford Gibson
Fiction
Imagining
Science
Lacking
Write
Visuals
Found
Visual
Writing
Lazy
Going
Began
Specificity
Things
Seemed
Shorthand
Unless
Visualize

More quotes by William Gibson

Image
When I was a child, science fiction was the first source I've found for information. Science fiction was a very very low cultural stream in those days. It was completly below the radar and no one bothered to censurate it.
William Gibson
Image
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.
William Gibson
Image
In effect, I grew up in a sort of timewarp, a place where times are scrambled up. There are elements of my childhood that look to me now, in memory more like the 1940s or the 1950s than the 1960s. Jack [Womack] says that that made us science fiction writers, because we grew up experiencing a kind of time travel.
William Gibson
Image
He took a duck in the face at 250 knots.
William Gibson
Image
When I was first writing about Japan, it was at the peak of the Bubble. Bubble popped, but they kept on going. Japanese street style feeds American iconics back into America in somewhat the way English rock once fed American blues back into America.
William Gibson
Image
His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass spines.
William Gibson
Image
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.
William Gibson
Image
People who feel safer with a gun than with guaranteed medical insurance don't yet have a fully adult concept of scary.
William Gibson
Image
I have this prejudice that trilogies are long, three-volume novels.
William Gibson
Image
The future is there... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.
William Gibson
Image
He'd been numb a long time, years. All his nights down Ninsei, his nights with Linda, numb in bed and numb at the cold sweating center of every drug deal. But now he'd found this warm thing, this chip of murder. Meat, some part of him said. It's the meat talking, ignore it.
William Gibson
Image
The past is past, the future unformed. There is only the moment, and that is where he prefers to be.
William Gibson
Image
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.
William Gibson
Image
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.
William Gibson
Image
Art Deco for me except in its most crazed and attenuated forms, it's jut a matter of taste.
William Gibson
Image
There's violence in my culture [from America's South].
William Gibson
Image
The future is not Google-able.
William Gibson
Image
We see in order to move we move in order to see.
William Gibson
Image
It's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information.
William Gibson
Image
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.
William Gibson