Quote

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.

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
Writing
Exist
Make
Seem
Good
Present
World
Less
Doesn
Seems
Whole
Polymaths
Real
Pretend

More quotes by William Gibson

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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.
William Gibson
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The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead station.
William Gibson
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Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts.
William Gibson
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I've been interested in autism since I've known about it, which is more or less since I've been writing.
William Gibson
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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.
William Gibson
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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.
William Gibson
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Addictions [...] started out like magical pets, pocket monsters. They did extraordinary tricks, showed you things you hadn't seen, were fun. But came, through some gradual dire alchemy, to make decisions for you. Eventually, they were making your most crucial life-decisions. And they were [...] less intelligent than goldfish.
William Gibson
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Futurists get to a certain age and, as one does, they suddenly recognize their own mortality.
William Gibson
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People who feel safer with a gun than with guaranteed medical insurance don't yet have a fully adult concept of scary.
William Gibson
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A part of that [timewrap] for me was growing up in a culture that violence had always been a part of. It wasn't an aberration, though I realize that in retrospect. I grew up in the part of the U.S. where all of Cormac McCarthy's novels are set and that's a pretty violent place.
William Gibson
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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.
William Gibson
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Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination.
William Gibson
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A book exists at the intersection of the author's subconscious and the reader's response.
William Gibson
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I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.
William Gibson
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The future is there, Cayce hears herself say, looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.
William Gibson
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There are bits of the literal future right here, right now, if you know how to look for them.
William Gibson
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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.
William Gibson
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I like living in Vancouver .It's more a matter of being a Vancouver loyalist. Harking back to what I said about growing up with the inherent violence in the southern U.S., I'm deeply enamoured of, and entirely used to living in a society with gun laws akin to those of a Scandinavian social democracy .It's a good thing.
William Gibson
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One of the liberating effects of science fiction when I was a teenager was precisely its ability to tune me into all sorts of strange data and make me realize that I wasn’t as totally isolated in perceiving the world as being monstrous and crazy
William Gibson
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I have this prejudice that trilogies are long, three-volume novels.
William Gibson