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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.

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
Phones
Places
Public
Language
Gestural
Part
Cigarettes
Belonged
Considerable
Cigarette

More quotes by William Gibson

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I don't have to write about the future. For most people, the present is enough like the future to be pretty scary.
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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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.
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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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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The future is here - it just has not been uniformly distributed.
William Gibson
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[I've gone to big stadium rock concerts at some artist's invitation], and eventually you find yourself in the room with the Radiant Being around whom all this is revolving. It's very bizarre, and it's quasi-religious, or possibly genuinely religious. Spooky. It's a spooky and interesting thing.
William Gibson
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Stand high long enough and your lightning will come.
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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I don't think of myself as being particulary a subversive writer, but I like to think that my work could afford someone else, the extra degree of freedom that I found when I first found science fiction.
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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Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking.
William Gibson
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Three in the morning. Making yourself a cup of coffee in the dark, using a flashlight when you pour the boiling water.
William Gibson
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The culture is still there, and people are still doing it. I imagine some people are doing it very well indeed. As for me, it definitely was my native literary culture. Science fiction was where I'm from, but on the way to now, I went through a lot of other territory, and I wasn't really that culturally conventional an SF writer when I started.
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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A nation,” he heard himself say, “consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual’s morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation’s laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn’t a nation.
William Gibson
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Tim Powers is a brilliant writer.
William Gibson
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I'd always maintained that much of the anarchy and craziness of the early internet had a lot to do with the fact that governments just hadn't realised it was there.
William Gibson
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I suppose I do the Japanese because I just don't know China. Chinese popular culture has never evoked that instant of, Whoah! What's that? that I have with Japanese popular culture.
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