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" I don't much live my life as if I was living in a Raymond Chandler novel, which is probably a good thing. "
William Gibson
Live
Living
Much
Related Quotes:
" If I'm practicing making up what the characters will do, it's never good. In fact, when I catch myself doing that, I try to get rid of that section, and try and let them start making the decisions. "
William Gibson
Good
Myself
Start
" I don't have to write about the future. For most people, the present is enough like the future to be pretty scary. "
William Gibson
Future
Enough
Scary
" I'm happiest with people who've gotten furthest from traditional ideas of nationalism. "
William Gibson
Happiest
Nationalism
People
" A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. "
William Gibson
Human
Data
City
" In 1981, I was a futurist - or at least I was a guy who put on a futurist hat occasionally - and I wrote about the 21st century. "
William Gibson
Put
Wrote
Who
" 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
Me
" 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. "
William Gibson
Story
Doing
Down
" 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
Lazy
Science
Science Fiction
" The history of the past, a hundred years from now, won't be the history of the past that we learned in school because much more will have been revealed, and adjectives we can't even imagine will have been brought to bear on what we did learn in school. "
William Gibson
Will
History
Learn
" The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead station. "
William Gibson
Dead
Color
Port
" 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
Fact
Internet
Early
" I can't imagine writing a book without some strong female characters, unless that was a demand of the setting. "
William Gibson
Without
Writing
Strong
" 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
Dead
Heart
Out
" I'm not a computer guy. I'm like an anthropologist. I'm fascinated with people's obsessions. I've learned to wear them. "
William Gibson
Computer
Them
Guy
" Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye. "
William Gibson
Light
More
Than
" 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. "
William Gibson
Science Fiction
Me
American
" I grew up in southwestern Virginia. I was born in South Carolina, but only because my parents had a vacation cabin or something there on the beach. I was like a summer baby. But I did grow up in the South. I grew up in serious, serious Appalachia, in a very small town. "
William Gibson
Beach
Small
Vacation
" 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. "
William Gibson
World
Will
Think
" 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. "
William Gibson
Influence
My Own
Want
" 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
Dreams
Science
Job
" 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? "
William Gibson
Child
Time
Teachers
" I'm often saddened and dismayed to see myself portrayed as either a Luddite or as a raving technophile. I've always thought that my job was to be as anthropologically neutral about emerging technologies as possible. "
William Gibson
See
About
Always
" If you make something, it's an artifact. It's something that somebody or some corporate entity has caused to come into being. A great many human beings have thought about each of the artifacts that surround us. Different degrees of intelligence and attention have been brought to bear on anything. "
William Gibson
Intelligence
You
Thought
" I'm always interested in the spooky repurposing of everyday things. "
William Gibson
Things
Spooky
Always
" I'm quite proud of what I anticipated about reality television from my books in the early '90s, which I based on the early seasons of 'Cops' and on the amazing stuff I had read about happening on Japanese shows and the British 'Big Brother'. "
William Gibson
Early
Seasons
Amazing
" The people I hang out with tend to use Macs, not that I think they're necessarily superior. "
William Gibson
People
Use
Superior
" My dream scenario would be that you could go into a bookshop, examine copies of every book in print that they're able to offer, then for a fee have them produce in a minute or two a beautiful finished copy in a dust jacket that you would pay for and take home. "
William Gibson
Copy
Dream
You
" 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. "
William Gibson
Sense
Head
Book
" 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. "
William Gibson
Difficult
Computers
Watch
" 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. "
William Gibson
You
Science
Places