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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.

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

More quotes by William Gibson

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Tim Powers is a brilliant writer.
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That's one of my favorite things about Twitter: You can tweak your feed into a fabulous novelty engine. That's only one thing you can do with it, but it's one of the things I find most entertaining about it.
William Gibson
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I can see television much more easily than I can see features, because the economy and politics of making big, big features seems to me to be narrowing even from what it was.
William Gibson
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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
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You must learn to overcome your very natural and appropriate revulsion for your own work.
William Gibson
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Fiction is an illusion wrought with many small, conventionally symbolic marks, triggering visions in the minds of others
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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I watch for emergent technologies and pay attention to what people say they'll be good for, then see what we actually use them for. It never occurred to me that a tiny telephone with a wireless transceiver would do whatever it is that it's done to us.
William Gibson
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I probably had something to do with being southern. For some reason, over the last few years I've been much more conscious of that. It's probably because my friend Jack Womack has a thesis that he and I write the way we do because we're southern and we experienced the very tail end of the premeditated south.
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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When I began to write fiction that I knew would be published as science fiction, [and] part of what I brought to it was the critical knowledge that science fiction was always about the period in which it was written.
William Gibson
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I only go to Japan when there's someone who can afford to bring me there, and consequently I may never go again!
William Gibson
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I find it interesting to see people - mostly people who are younger than I am - going to considerable trouble to try to reproduce things from an era that was far more physical, from a less virtual day.
William Gibson
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Time moves in one direction, memory in another.
William Gibson
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I assume that - because you can get degrees in journalism from very reputable universities - I assume that people can be trained to be journalists. I've never been entirely certain that anyone can be trained to be a novelist in the same way.
William Gibson
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Things aren't different. Things are things.
William Gibson
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The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.
William Gibson
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I think that the collectible ephemera craze/awareness is probably driven by a reverse market, rebounding off the sense of everything being mass-produced. It's the last step you take in trying to find something unique.
William Gibson
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I think that I've always written about things that are very personal, but initially, I coded everything.
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