Quote

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
Absolutely
Sun
Perhaps
Changed
Recently
Everything
Perpetual
Nothing
Central
Work
Tension
Driving

More quotes by William Gibson

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Our hardware is likely to turn into something like us a lot faster than we are likely to turn into something like our hardware...I very much doubt that our grandchildren will understand the distinction between that which is a computer and that which isn't.
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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Somehow I think that if Toronto had been forced to wait a decade [from 80th], it would be a better looking city.
William Gibson
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I like the idea of people who've had some success in one form secretly wanting to be something else I have some of that myself. I look for it in other people who've established themselves in some particular art form, and then you find out that they really would like to design running shoes, or edit literary magazines or something.
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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The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet.
William Gibson
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Somewhere, deep within her, surfaces a tiny clockwork submarine. There are times when you can only take the next step. And then another.
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 been interested in people who aren't from anywhere in particular. I think it's all melting. This has been true for as long as I can remember in my adult life.
William Gibson
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The past is past, the future unformed. There is only the moment, and that is where he prefers to be.
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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I was once really close to sitting down and having a conversation with a shadowy young woman who is reputed have become a millionaire by investing in Beanie Babies. She was someone that a couple people claimed to know, she seemed to exist, but she remained shadowy.
William Gibson
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I guess Twitter is the first thing that has been attractive to me as social media. I never felt the least draw to Facebook or MySpace. I've been involved anonymously in some tiny listservs, mainly in my ceaseless quest for random novelty, and sometimes while doing something that more closely resembles research.
William Gibson
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We don't legislate emergent technologies into existence. We almost never do. They just emerge, dragged forth by Adam Smith's invisible hand. Then we have to see what people are actually going to do with them, and try to legislate to take account of that.
William Gibson
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I'm embarrassed if I think anyone knows exactly what I paid for something, or even where I got it. I want what I'm wearing to feel good on, wear well, and to be extremely functional.
William Gibson
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I had a list of things that science fiction, particularly American science fiction, to me seemed to do with tedious regularity. One was to not have strong female protagonists. One was to envision the future, whatever it was, as America.
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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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 can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.
William Gibson
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I realized that everyone in Western society, in some weird way, believes that they've had the experience of producing feature films.
William Gibson