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" 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
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" 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. "
William Gibson
Opportunity
Experience
Life
" I think with one exception I've never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed. "
William Gibson
Never
Think
Opening
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
William Gibson
Impact
Think
Great
" When I start writing a novel, I have no sense of direction, no idea, really nothing. "
William Gibson
Idea
Writing
Direction
" 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. "
William Gibson
Morning
Living
World
" 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
" 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
" 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
" And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human. "
William Gibson
She
Blue
Certainty
" 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 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. "
William Gibson
Way
People
Never
" As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair. "
William Gibson
Change
Technology
History
" 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
" I like the idea of people who've had some success in one form secretly wanting to be something else; I have some of that myself. I look for it in other people who've established themselves in some particular art form, and then you find out that they really would like to design running shoes, or edit literary magazines or something. "
William Gibson
Success
Art
Myself
" The people I hang out with tend to use Macs, not that I think they're necessarily superior. "
William Gibson
People
Use
Superior
" 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
" Gadgets are usually the last thing I think about, and if there's something new, I'll get to the store for the final shipment of the first generation when it's on sale. So I have last year's stuff. "
William Gibson
Last
Year
Think
" I'm happiest with people who've gotten furthest from traditional ideas of nationalism. "
William Gibson
Happiest
Nationalism
People
" 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
" The thing that 'Neuromancer' predicts as being actually like the Internet isn't actually like the Internet at all! "
William Gibson
Actually
Being
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
" 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
" 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. "
William Gibson
Wrong
Creating
Doing
" 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
" Science fiction writers aren't fortune tellers. Fortune tellers are fakes. "
William Gibson
Science Fiction
Science
Fortune
" 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 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
" The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead station. "
William Gibson
Dead
Color
Port