A book exists at the intersection of the author's subconscious and the reader's response. William Gibson More Quotes by William Gibson More Quotes From William Gibson 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 menideasinteresting It had also been my belief since I started writing fiction that science fiction is never really about the future. When science fiction is old, you can only read it as being pretty much about the moment in which it was written. But it seemed to me that the toolkit that science fiction had given me when I started working had become the toolkit of a kind of literary naturalism that could be applied to an inherently incredible present. William Gibson kindbeliefwriting I have always been intensely uncomfortable with the idea of a science fiction writer as prophet. Not that there haven't been science fiction writers who think of themselves as having some sort of prophetic role, but when I think of that, I always think of H.G. Wells - he would think of what was going to happen, and he would imagine how it would happen, and then he would create a fiction to illustrate the idea that he'd had. And no part of my process has ever resembled that at all. William Gibson science-fictionimaginethinking When I start writing a new imaginary future, I have no idea what it is. The characters arrive first. They help me figure out where they are living and I get to fill in the gaps with that and where we are. So when I get to the end of the process of composition, if I feel that I have really done my job, I have no idea what I've got - and I then spend essentially the rest of my life figuring out what it might mean. William Gibson writingcharactermean 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 spacereadingeurope I've been through the whole western world, and it seems to me that there's more retail floor space devoted to the sale of books than food! There's more retail floor space devoted to the sale of books than there's been in the entire history of humanity! It's grotesque! William Gibson spacehumanitybook [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 currencyinformationused [When] Johnny Mnemonic was coming out and I realized that all the kids that worked in 7-11 knew more - or thought they knew more - about feature film production than I did. And that was from reading Premiere, that was from this change that came from magazines that treat their readers as players. Magazines that purport to sell you the inside experience. William Gibson readingplayerkids I realized that everyone in Western society, in some weird way, believes that they've had the experience of producing feature films. William Gibson filmbelieveway 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 fifteenmemoriesculture I've gone to big stadium rock concerts at some artist's invitation, and there's this invariable, fascinating and rather sad situation of concentric circles of availability. There are Green Rooms within Green Rooms literally within Green Rooms. There are seven or eight degrees of exclusivity, and within each circle of exclusivity, everyone is so happy to be there, and they don't know that the next level exists. William Gibson eightrocksartist [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 rocksartistreligious I worry about what we'll do in the future, [about the instantaneous co-opting of pop culture]. Where is our new stuff going to come from? William Gibson worrystuffculture What we're doing pop culturally is like burning the rain forest. The biodiversity of pop culture is really, really in danger. William Gibson rainforestsculture I watch a sort of primitive form of the recommodification machine around my friends and myself in sixties, and it took about two years for this clumsy mechanism to get and try to sell us The Monkees. In 1977, it took about eight months for a slightly faster more refined mechanism to put punk in the window of Holt Renfrew. It's gotten faster ever since. The scene in Seattle that Nirvana came from: as soon as it had a label, it was on the runways of Paris.There's no grace period, so that's a way in which I see us losing the interstitial. William Gibson eighttwoyears 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 dreamworkjobs To the very limited extent that I have a political consciousness, to some extent I'm a lazy, apolitical sort of guy that just flits around. William Gibson lazypoliticalguy If I were in severely straitened socio-economic circumstances and had to move to the U.S., I'd probably opt for Athens, GA, or Lawrence, KS. As boho guys usually do, live cheap in the Left Bank of Kansas. William Gibson kansasguymoving 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 heartboysyears Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places that had once belonged to cigarettes now belonged to phones. William Gibson cigarettephoneslanguage
