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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 think that our future has lost that capital F we used to spell it with. The science fiction future of my childhood has had a capital F - it was assumed to be an American Future because America was the future. The Future was assumed to be inherently heroic, and a lot of other things, as well. "

William Gibson

Future

Lost

Childhood

" I watch for emergent technologies and pay attention to what people say they'll be good for, then see what we actually use them for. It never occurred to me that a tiny telephone with a wireless transceiver would do whatever it is that it's done to us. "

William Gibson

Say

Attention

" 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. "

" I don't begin a novel with a shopping list - the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it. "

" I'm not a computer guy. I'm like an anthropologist. I'm fascinated with people's obsessions. I've learned to wear them. "

" 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. "

" Why shouldn't we give our teachers a license to obtain software, all software, any software, for nothing? Does anyone demand a licensing fee, each time a child is taught the alphabet? "

" When I wrote 'Neuromancer', I had a list in my head of all the things the future was assumed to be which it would not be in the book I was about to write. In a sense, I intended 'Neuromancer', among other things, to be a critique of all the aspects of science fiction that no longer satisfied me. "

" Science fiction writers aren't fortune tellers. Fortune tellers are fakes. "

" I don't generate a storyline and then fill it out in the course of writing. The story actually generates in the course of the writing. It's one of the reasons I've never been comfortable doing screenplays, because in order to get the contract for the screenplay, you have to sit down and tell them what's going to happen. "

" In a sense, if you're not getting it wrong really a lot when you're creating imaginary futures, then you're just not doing it enough. You're not creating enough imaginary futures. "

" 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. "

" I don't think nostalgia is a healthy modality. But nostalgia and a sense of history are not the same thing. Nostalgia is a dysfunction of the historical impulse, or a corruption of the historical impulse. "

" Occasionally if I look back at something I've written I'll find one of those that I don't understand, but that's a bad thing - the unconscious has dealt me a bad hand. "

" The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet. "

" If I write something set 60 years in the future, I am going to have to explain how humanity got there, and that's becoming quite a big job. "

" I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists. "

" 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

You

History

" I think the large part of the function of the Internet is it is archival. It's unreliable to the extent that word on the street is unreliable. It's no more unreliable than that. You can find the truth on the street if you work at it. I don't think of the Internet or the virtual as being inherently inferior to the so-called real. "

" All my life I've encountered people who were obsessed with one particular class of object or experience, who were constantly pursuing that thing. Since I was a little kid, I hadn't afforded myself the opportunity, I guess, to have a hobby. "

" I think with one exception I've never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed. "

" The people I hang out with tend to use Macs, not that I think they're necessarily superior. "

" When I start writing a novel, I have no sense of direction, no idea, really nothing. "

" 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. "

" Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. "

" 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. "

" I assume that - because you can get degrees in journalism from very reputable universities - I assume that people can be trained to be journalists. I've never been entirely certain that anyone can be trained to be a novelist in the same way. "

" The 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it. "

" I've been interested in autism since I've known about it, which is more or less since I've been writing. "

William Gibson

Writing

Autism

" Cyberspace is colonising what we used to think of as the real world. I think that our grandchildren will probably regard the distinction we make between what we call the real world and what they think of as simply the world as the quaintest and most incomprehensible thing about us. "