Quotessence
Home / Authors / William Gibson
William Gibson

William Gibson Quotes

Novelist

Filter quotes by topic

AllPeopleThinkingCyberpunkIfsWritingWayFictionScience FictionKnowsTechnologyBookFirstsImagineTryingCultureNeuromancerWorldYearsCertainCyberspace

Famous William Gibson Quotes

“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.”

PeopleIfsThinkingLooksSaidImportantWholeHappensPoorFictionRecordsHappenedTerribleCapacityImportant ThingsScience FictionHistory Of Science
Author:William Gibson
Create image

“The ecological impact of book manufacture and traditional book marketing - I think that should really be considered. We have this industry in which we cut down trees to make the paper that we then use enormous amounts of electricity to turn into books that weigh a great deal and are then shipped enormous distances to point-of-sale retail.”

ThinkingShouldBookUseTurnsDealsCuttingTreeIndustryAmountPaperImpactDistanceMarketingEnormousTraditionalElectricityEcologicalRetail
Author:William Gibson
Create image

“I think that I've always written about things that are very personal, but initially, I coded everything. I buried everything under layers and layers and layers of code, but the signifiers of my emotionality were there for me. I knew where the magnets were, behind the gyprock, and the magnets were very powerful. I think they had to be powerful for me, otherwise the reader wouldn't have a reciprocal experience.”

ThinkingPowerfulBehindsWrittenReaderCodeBuriedLayersVery PowerfulMagnetReciprocal
Author:William Gibson
Create image

“I don't think we know yet what broadcast television did to us, although it obviously did lots. I don't think we're far enough away from it yet to really get a handle on it. We get these things, I think they start changing us right away, we don't notice we're changing. Our perception of the whole thing shifts, and then we're in the new way of doing things, and we take it for granted.”

ThinkingKnowsWayEnoughWholeTelevisionPerceptionHandleGrantedNew WaysNew Ways Of Doing Things
Author:William Gibson
Create image

“I had a lot of issues with the genre, and I probably even had issues with the whole idea of genre. I was coming into it with a certain degree of outsider attitude, and I didn't have a long-term plan. But I think the way it's worked out, it's sort of warped into what I suppose you could say is my own genre. If people like my books, they have some idea of what the next one will be like.”

PeopleIfsThinkingWayLongBookIdeasWholeCertainNextTermMy OwnAttitudeIssuesPlansDegreesGenreLong TermOutsidersThe Next One
Author:William Gibson
Create image

“I think that one of the visions that is closest to reality is the cardboard city in the subway station in Tokyo, which is based very closely on a series of documentary photographs of people living like that and of the contents of the boxes. Those are quite haunting because Tokyo homeless people reiterate the whole nature of living in Tokyo in these cardboard boxes, they're only slightly smaller than Tokyo apartments, and they have almost as many consumer goods. It's a nightmare of boxes within boxes.”

PeopleThinkingWholeRealityCitiesVisionSeriesPhotographBoxesConsumersNightmareGoodsStationsClosestApartmentHomelessDocumentariesHauntingSubwayTokyoHomeless PeopleCardboard Boxes
Author:William Gibson
Create image

“I knew where the magnets were, behind the gyprock, and the magnets were very powerful. I think they had to be powerful for me, otherwise the reader wouldn't have a reciprocal experience. But I was very careful to bury them deeply, deeply in the plaster and paint over them. I didn't want anybody to directly access them, and that's gradually changed for me.”

ThinkingWantPowerfulBehindsChangedReaderPaintCarefulAccessVery PowerfulMagnetReciprocalPlasters
Author:William Gibson
Create image

“I was travelling with Bruce Sterling on our mutual Difference Engine tour and he became aware from the experience of travelling with me that I would distinguish among the shoes in a perfectly normal fashion, but form him it was a revelation. There's a very lyrical passage in Holy Fire about old wealthy European men and their shoes, and how beautiful their shoes are, and how there have never been shoes as beautiful. I think that that was probably as close as Bruce will ever get to homage in my direction. I made him aware of footwear fashion.”

ThinkingMenMadeBeautifulFormDifferencesFireFashionHolyNormalShoesRevelationsMutualWealthyPassagesEnginesHomageLyricalSterlingFootwearPerfectly Normal
Author:William Gibson
Create image

“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.”

ThinkingImagineScience FictionUncomfortableProphetProphetic
Author:William Gibson
Create image