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We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.

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
Natural
Counter
Forgetting
Constructs
Intended
Species
Flow
Strange
Forget
Artifacts

More quotes by William Gibson

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We monitor many frequencies. We listen always. Came a voice, out of the babel of tongues, speaking to us. It played us a mighty dub.
William Gibson
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The designers [of the 1930s] were populists, you see they were trying to give the public what it wanted. What the public wanted was the future.
William Gibson
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The future is here - it just has not been uniformly distributed.
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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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.
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'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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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
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I'm very primitive in terms of economics. The kind of new business in which stock gets more valuable because the company grows, but there must be limits to growth. But if publishing is expanding to fill that retail space, it seems like there may be a necessary and unpleasant correction waiting down the road. How many books to people WANT?
William Gibson
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I think the large part of the function of the Internet is it is archival. It's unreliable to the extent that word on the street is unreliable. It's no more unreliable than that. You can find the truth on the street if you work at it. I don't think of the Internet or the virtual as being inherently inferior to the so-called real.
William Gibson
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For years I have been mourning and not for my dead, it is for this boy for whatever corner in my heart died when his childhood slid out of my arms.
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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There's an idea called gray man, in the security business, that I find interesting. They teach people to dress unobtrusively. Chinos instead of combat pants, and if you really need the extra pockets, a better design conceals them. They assume, actually, that the bad guys will shoot all the guys wearing combat pants first, just to be sure.
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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Friday, August 04, 2006 MONUMENT posted 8:31 AM Silver nitrous girls pointed into occult winds of porn and destiny.
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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It seems as though everyone is going to the currency of celebrity. Everyone's getting their own account of whatever that currency is. That's something neat.
William Gibson
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We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition.
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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Art Deco for me except in its most crazed and attenuated forms, it's jut a matter of taste.
William Gibson