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" I can't imagine writing a book without some strong female characters, unless that was a demand of the setting. "

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" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I've become convinced that nostalgia is a fundamentally unhealthy modality. When you see it, it's usually attached to something else that's really, seriously bad. I don't traffic in nostalgia. We're becoming a global culture. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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? "

" 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. "

" All we really have when we pretend to write about the future is the moment in which we are writing. That's why every imagined future obsoletes like an ice cream melting on the way back from the corner store. "

" Sometimes, I can myself be frustrated by books that seem to me to be insufficiently realistic about the world's potential for just being totally a randomly bad place. "

" I started with Apple, in a pre-Windows era when PCs seemed to involve more of a learning curve. But the fact that I'm yet to acquire so much as a single virus still seems a very good thing. "

" I try to be objective about technology. Agnostic, in a sense. Whatever personal opinions I form tend to have more to do with what we find to do with the new thing. "

" The Internet is part of this ongoing, species-long project we've been working on since we climbed down out of the trees in the savanna. We've been working on it without really knowing it. "

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

" 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. "

" I'm interested in how people all over the world array themselves and go forth in the morning to do whatever they have to do to make a living. "

" 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. "

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

" Generation X is dead. It has come to mean anyone aged 13 to 55 years old. "

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

" The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience. "

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

" 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. "

" I didn't have a manifesto. I had some discontent. It seemed to me that midcentury mainstream American science fiction had often been triumphalist and militaristic, a sort of folk propaganda for American exceptionalism. "

Science Fiction

" 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 don't much live my life as if I was living in a Raymond Chandler novel, which is probably a good thing. "

" Science fiction was one of those places, particularly during the McCarthy era, where you could write whatever you wanted because it was beneath contempt. They didn't bother censoring it. "

" In the early '80s, I happened to find myself in the vicinity of people who would work for Microsoft five years later. "

" I've never really been very interested in computers themselves. I don't watch them; I watch how people behave around them. That's becoming more difficult to do because everything is around them. "

" 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. "