William Gibson Quotes

The U.S. hundred is the international currency of bad shit, Hollis, and by the same token the number one target of counterfeiters.

Paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer.

His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it.

...destiny spelled out in a constellation of cheap chrome.

Singaporeans seemed generally quite loathe to discuss these more intimate policies of government with a curious foreign visitor who was more than twice as tall as the average human, and who sweated slowly but continuously, like and aged cheese.

a dream long lost in the compulsive effort to fill space, to replicate some family image of self.

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

The child saw things that were too evident, too obvious for the trained eye.

Case had always taken it for granted that the real bosses, the kingpins in a given industry, would be both more and less than people.

She's right, Kate's right, I'm right and you're wrong. If you drive her away from here it will be over my dead — chair, has it never occurred to you at on one occasion you might be consummately wrong?

"Know what's worse than imaginary, Leon?"
"What?"
"Half-imaginary."

Her fingers found a random second stud and she was catapulted through the static wall, into cluttered vastness, the notional void of cyberspace, the bright grid of the matrix ranged around her like an infinite cage.

That evil wasn’t glamorous, but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room, however that might happen, to become its bigger self. Bigger, with more horrible results, but never more than the cumulative weight of ordinary human baseness.

"I felt like a punk who’d gone out to buy a switchblade and come home with a small neutron bomb.

"Screwed again", I thought. "What good’s a neutron bomb in a streetfight?

There are no backwaters where things can breed — our connectivity is so high and so global that there are no more Seattles and no more Haight-Ashburys. We’ve arrived at a level of commodification that may have negated the concept of counterculture.