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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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William Gibson
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 17
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Conway
South Carolina
William Ford Gibson
Would
Knew
Written
Published
Knowledge
Began
Science
Period
Write
Critical
Part
Brought
Writing
Periods
Always
Fiction

More quotes by 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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Somehow I think that if Toronto had been forced to wait a decade [from 80th], it would be a better looking city.
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If someone comes in and says, What are you doing, if I'm honest, the answer is, I don't know. But I'm doing THIS, don't know why.
William Gibson
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The future is already upon us, it is just unevenly distributed.
William Gibson
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My dream scenario would be that you could go into a bookshop, examine copies of every book in print that they're able to offer, then for a fee have them produce in a minute or two a beautiful finished copy in a dust jacket that you would pay for and take home.
William Gibson
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I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity. Its record for being accurately predictive is really, really poor! If you look at the whole history of science fiction, what people have said is going to happen, what writers have said is going to happen, and what actually happened - it's terrible.
William Gibson
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I've always assumed from the beginning that I had relatively few contemporaries among my readership. Not that I was consciously writing for a younger audience but that what I was doing interested a younger audience, or at least threatened them less.
William Gibson
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The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience.
William Gibson
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You could have sex relatively comfortably on a platform of books, but not on a platform of PDA.s. Hardcover books. Paperbacks might start sliding around. Though I.d still prefer paperbacks to a pile of PDA.s.
William Gibson
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Damien is a friend. Their boy-girl Lego doesn't click, he would say.
William Gibson
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I think with one exception I've never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed.
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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I can't imagine writing a book without some strong female characters, unless that was a demand of the setting.
William Gibson
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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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Generation X is dead. It has come to mean anyone aged 13 to 55 years old.
William Gibson
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Tim Powers is a brilliant writer.
William Gibson
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The experience of celebrity is gradually being democratized.
William Gibson
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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.
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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A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my own career want list. That label enabled mainstream science fiction to safely assimilate our dissident influence, such as it was. Cyberpunk could then be embraced and given prizes and patted on the head, and genre science fiction could continue unchanged.
William Gibson