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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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William Gibson
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 17
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Conway
South Carolina
William Ford Gibson
Everything
Perpetual
Nothing
Central
Work
Tension
Driving
Absolutely
Sun
Perhaps
Changed
Recently

More quotes by 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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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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It's an American thing, but it's particularly a southern thing, and its romanticization is hyper-Southern. And it's still irresistible to me, even in middle age. There's something that pulls me to that, but at the same time, I have this increasing awareness of how banal it really is - that evil is inherently banal.
William Gibson
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Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description, as science writers, but there are bad dreams as well as good dreams. We're dreamers, you see, but we're also realists, of a sort.
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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Things aren't different. Things are things.
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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I think with one exception I've never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed.
William Gibson
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Novels set in imaginary futures are necessarily about the moment in which they are written.
William Gibson
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I'm not a very intentional writer. I try to be as unintentional as possible. What I basically try to do is invite the zeitgeist in to tea.
William Gibson
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I very seldom compose anything in my head which later finds its way into text, except character names sometimes - I'm often very much inspired by things that I misunderstand.
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 grew up in southwestern Virginia. I was born in South Carolina, but only because my parents had a vacation cabin or something there on the beach. I was like a summer baby. But I did grow up in the South. I grew up in serious, serious Appalachia, in a very small town.
William Gibson
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I would like to design what people generally call streetwear. I'd like to dress skateboarders, or whatever the older equivalent of skateboarders are. I pay more attention to that stuff than anyone would ever imagine because I'm watching what the designers do.
William Gibson
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Every shop in every High Street in Europe is filled with basically the same stuff. There's a street in every city of the world that has a Gap and Benneton's, and the upscale versions of those.
William Gibson
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Stand high long enough and your lightning will come.
William Gibson
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There's violence in my culture [from America's South].
William Gibson
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And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.
William Gibson
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The present tense made him nervous.
William Gibson
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I was afraid to watch 'Blade Runner' in the theater because I was afraid the movie would be better than what I myself had been able to imagine. In a way, I was right to be afraid, because even the first few minutes were better.
William Gibson