Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" I think that technologies are morally neutral until we apply them. It's only when we use them for good or for evil that they become good or evil. "
William Gibson
Evil
Think
Only
Related Quotes:
" 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
" 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
" 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 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. "
William Gibson
Corruption
Healthy
History
" 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 find it interesting to see people - mostly people who are younger than I am - going to considerable trouble to try to reproduce things from an era that was far more physical, from a less virtual day. "
William Gibson
People
Day
I Am
" 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. "
William Gibson
Project
Knowing
Internet
" 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. "
William Gibson
Me
Place
Potential
" Time moves in one direction, memory in another. "
William Gibson
Another
Time
Moves
" I'm happiest with people who've gotten furthest from traditional ideas of nationalism. "
William Gibson
Happiest
Nationalism
People
" The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet. "
William Gibson
Arrived
Wisdom
Just
" 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
" 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
" Whenever I read a contemporary literary novel that describes the world we're living in, I wait for the science fiction tools to come out. Because they have to - the material demands it. "
William Gibson
World
Living
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
" 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
" 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. "
William Gibson
Job
Explain
Future
" 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. "
William Gibson
Bad
Seriously
Culture
" Science fiction writers aren't fortune tellers. Fortune tellers are fakes. "
William Gibson
Science Fiction
Science
Fortune
" The box was a universe, a poem, frozen on the boundaries of human experience. "
William Gibson
Human
Boundaries
Universe
" 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
" If you've read a lot of vintage science fiction, as I have at one time or another in my life, you can't help but realise how wrong we get it. I have gotten it wrong more times than I've gotten it right. But I knew that when I started; I knew that before I wrote a word of science fiction. "
William Gibson
My Life
Science
Help
" 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
" 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 a reluctant writer of non-fiction, in part because I don't really feel qualified. "
William Gibson
Really
Writer
Because
" 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. "
William Gibson
Random
Research
Social Media
" 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
" 'Cyberspace' as a term is sort of over. It's over in the way that, after a certain time, people stopped using the suffix '-electro' to make things cool, because everything was electrical. 'Electro' was all over the early 20th century, and now it's gone. I think 'cyber' is sort of the same way. "
William Gibson
Cyber
People
Think
" Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. "
William Gibson
Technology
Nation
Children
" The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead station. "
William Gibson
Dead
Color
Port