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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
Strange
Forget
Artifacts
Natural
Counter
Forgetting
Constructs
Intended
Species
Flow

More quotes by William Gibson

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That's something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: The most interesting applications turn up on a battlefield, or in a gallery.
William Gibson
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We live in an age of seriously crap mass clothing. They've made a science of it.
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.
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I'm quite proud of what I anticipated about reality television from my books in the early '90s, which I based on the early seasons of 'Cops' and on the amazing stuff I had read about happening on Japanese shows and the British 'Big Brother'.
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You needed a new pancreas. The one we bought for you frees you from a dangerous dependency.” “Thanks, but I was enjoying that dependency.
William Gibson
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All I knew about the word cyberspace when I coined it, was that it seemed like an effective buzzword. It seemed evocative and essentially meaningless. It was suggestive of something, but had no real semantic meaning, even for me, as I saw it emerge on the page.
William Gibson
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All we really have when we pretend to write about the future is the moment in which we are writing. That's why every imagined future obsoletes like an ice cream melting on the way back from the corner store.
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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It was hot, the night we burned Chrome.
William Gibson
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I'm a reluctant writer of non-fiction, in part because I don't really feel qualified.
William Gibson
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I do not think an enormous permanent underclass is a very good thing to have if you're attempting to operate something that at least pretends sometimes to be a democracy.
William Gibson
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His eyes were eggs of unstable crystal, vibrating with a frequency whose name was rain and the sound of trains, suddenly sprouting a humming forest of hair-fine glass spines.
William Gibson
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I've become convinced that nostalgia is a fundamentally unhealthy modality. When you see it, it's usually attached to something else that's really, seriously bad. I don't traffic in nostalgia. We're becoming a global culture.
William Gibson
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A lot of the buildings [in Toronto] around Yonge and Bloor is the architectural equivalent of Kipper Ties and 8 collar points. It's ghastly and no amount of street-level retail glitz can lift it.
William Gibson
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What we're doing pop culturally is like burning the rain forest. The biodiversity of pop culture is really, really in danger.
William Gibson
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Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television.
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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[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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Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.
William Gibson
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Generation X is dead. It has come to mean anyone aged 13 to 55 years old.
William Gibson