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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.

William Gibson

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William Gibson
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 17
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Conway
South Carolina
William Ford Gibson
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More quotes by William Gibson

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His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol.
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I have this prejudice that trilogies are long, three-volume novels.
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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.
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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.
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I'm interested in people who become culturally fluent. And when I meet young people I'm often amazed they don't quite seem to have a sense of where they're from. They're like the citizens of the airport.
William Gibson
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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.
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Time is money, but also money is money.
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It doesn't matter how fast your modem is if you're being shelled by ethnic separatists.
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The future is not Google-able.
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If you’re fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don’t know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one’s own culture.
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Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.
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When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.
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Cyberspace is everting. It's interpenetrating our everyday reality to the point that on-line is our normal waking state.
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I realized that everyone in Western society, in some weird way, believes that they've had the experience of producing feature films.
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A book exists at the intersection of the author's subconscious and the reader's response.
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The future is here - it just has not been uniformly distributed.
William Gibson
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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
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The present tense made him nervous.
William Gibson
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To the extent that I can still believe in Bohemia, which I think is very important to me in some way that I don't yet really understand, to the extent that I still believe in that, I have to believe that there are viable degrees of freedom inherent if not realized in interstitial areas.
William Gibson
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I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.
William Gibson