Quote

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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William Gibson
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 17
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Conway
South Carolina
William Ford Gibson
Like
Seen
Monsters
Pocket
Decision
Tricks
Pet
Came
Eventually
Showed
Addictions
Less
Decisions
Magical
Goldfish
Making
Extraordinary
Pockets
Dire
Make
Intelligent
Hadn
Pets
Things
Fun
Crucial
Gradual
Life
Started
Addiction
Alchemy

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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.
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Fiction is an illusion wrought with many small, conventionally symbolic marks, triggering visions in the minds of others
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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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I'm a reluctant writer of non-fiction, in part because I don't really feel qualified.
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I buried everything under layers and layers and layers of code, but the signifiers of my emotionality were there, for me.
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You needed a new pancreas. The one we bought for you frees you from a dangerous dependency.” “Thanks, but I was enjoying that dependency.
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I can't imagine writing a book without some strong female characters, unless that was a demand of the setting. I actually tend to suspect that in real life, there have always been very strong female characters, but at certain stages of society, they've been asked to cool it.
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I think with one exception I've never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed.
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The Simpson's in Piccadilly has been turned into the largest bookstore in all of Europe! How can they fill it? All of these purpose-built Borders and Chapters and every new mall that goes up has a giant chain bookstore with a purpose-built author reading space, whoah, what's gong on there.
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When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.
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[The currency of being celebrity] used to be only the elect had any manna in the information society and everyone else was a consumer.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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She walked on, comforted by the surf, by the one perpetual moment of beach-time, the now-and-always of it.
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There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt. A point at which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is innately media-related.
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Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places that had once belonged to cigarettes now belonged to phones.
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It's an American thing, but it's particularly a southern thing, and its romanticization is hyper-Southern. And it's still irresistible to me, even in middle age. There's something that pulls me to that, but at the same time, I have this increasing awareness of how banal it really is - that evil is inherently banal.
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Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description, as science writers, but there are bad dreams as well as good dreams. We're dreamers, you see, but we're also realists, of a sort.
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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.
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