Quote

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.

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
Cannot
Digital
Communal
Also
Endless
Enabled
States
Memory
Inhabit
Today
Memories
Suspect
Sort
Suspects
State
Increasingly
Prosthetic
Culture
Fifteen
Prosthetics
Tell
Efficient
Anthropologists

More quotes by 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.
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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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.
William Gibson
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We see in order to move we move in order to see.
William Gibson
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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.
William Gibson
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We're living in a future that's weirder than anybody except possibly.
William Gibson
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This perpetual toggling between nothing being new, under the sun, and everything having very recently changed, absolutely, is perhaps the central driving tension of my work.
William Gibson
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Gadgets are usually the last thing I think about, and if there's something new, I'll get to the store for the final shipment of the first generation when it's on sale. So I have last year's stuff.
William Gibson
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I'm not the only one: witness Pokemon! They still keep coming up with this stuff that just rivets us in unexpected areas.
William Gibson
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His smile was the nightmare in my back pocket.(Speaking about Ronald Reagan)
William Gibson
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There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.
William Gibson
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To some extent I'm guilty of wishful thinking. The absence of the interstitial I find unbearable.
William Gibson
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I had a list of things that science fiction, particularly American science fiction, to me seemed to do with tedious regularity. One was to not have strong female protagonists. One was to envision the future, whatever it was, as America.
William Gibson
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It doesn't matter how fast your modem is if you're being shelled by ethnic separatists.
William Gibson
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The 'Net is a waste of time.
William Gibson
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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.
William Gibson
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Cyberspace is colonising what we used to think of as the real world. I think that our grandchildren will probably regard the distinction we make between what we call the real world and what they think of as simply the world as the quaintest and most incomprehensible thing about us.
William Gibson
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When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.
William Gibson
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I like the idea of people who've had some success in one form secretly wanting to be something else I have some of that myself. I look for it in other people who've established themselves in some particular art form, and then you find out that they really would like to design running shoes, or edit literary magazines or something.
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