William Ford Gibson
American-Canadian writer who has been called the "noir prophet" of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction.
I didn't imagine that art girls in the Midwest would be flashing their tits in cyberspace...but I'm glad that they're doing it.
That’s interesting in itself, because it shows you how adept they were at obscurity. They used their money to keep themselves out of the news.
“Honey,” Jammer said, “you'll learn. Some things you teach yourself to remember to forget.”
The stick-on holograms had actually had some effect on Bobby, because religion was now something he felt he’d considered and put aside. Basically, the way he figured it, there were just some people around who needed that shit, and he guessed there always had been, but he wasn’t one of them, so he didn’t.
They'd left the place littered with the abstract white forms of the foam packing units, with crumpled plastic film and hundreds of tiny foam beads. The Ono-Sendai; next year's most expensive Hosaka computer; a Sony monitor; a dozen disks of corporate-grade ice; a Braun coffee maker.
Viewing them induced a mild but not unpleasant vertigo, one of the rare times she was able to directly grasp the fact of her fame.
"Dix," Case said, "I wanna have a look at an AI in Berne. Can you think of any reason not to?"
"Not unless you got a morbid fear of death, no."
“You were hurt,” Kumiko said, looking at the scar.
Sally looked down. “Yeah.”
“Why don’t you have it removed?”
“Sometimes it’s good to remember.”
“Being hurt?”
“Being stupid.”
Naps are essential to my process. Not dreams, but that state adjacent to sleep, the mind on waking.
“As I luxuriate in the discovery that I am no special sponge for sorrow, but merely another fallible animal in this stone maze of a city, I come simultaneously to see that I am the focus of some vast device fueled by an obscure desire.”
Acceptance. Acceptance of the impermanence of being. And acceptance of the imperfect nature of being, or possibly the perfect nature of being, depending on how one looks at it. Acceptance that this is not a rehearsal. That this is it.
Another example — maybe a better one, in a way — was when it was confirmed that Michael Jackson was going to marry Elvis Presley's daughter. [loud, game-show buzzer noise] A good friend of mine in the States faxed me, and he simply … he said, "This makes your job more difficult." And I knew exactly, I knew exactly what he meant. 'Cos something … a scenario that seemed to belong to the universe of the late Terry Southern, was suddenly, suddenly real. It's that truth-is-stranger-than-fiction factor keeps getting jacked up on us on a fairly regular, maybe even exponential, basis. I think that's something peculiar to our time. I don't think our grandparents had to live with that.
I think of religions as franchise operations. Like chicken franchise operations. But that doesn't mean there's no chicken, right?
It's a world where there aren't families. It's the world of a young person going out into the wilderness, cities, and sort of in a way creating a family. You know, it's kind of like... it's not that it's a "goth book," but it's kind of rather the same stuff that makes kids be goths.
There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt. A point at which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is innately media-related.
"Hate," Case said. "Who do I hate? You tell me." "Who do you love?" the Finn's voice asked.
Organized religion, he saw, back in the day, had been purely a signal-to-noise proposition, at once the medium and the message, a one-channel universe. For Europe, that channel was Christian, and broadcasting from Rome, but nothing could be broadcast faster than a man could travel on horseback. There was a hierarchy in place, and a highly organized methodology of top-down signal dissemination, but the time lag enforced by tech-lack imposed a near-disastrous ratio, the noise of heresy constantly threatening to overwhelm the signal.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Somewhere, very close, the laugh that wasn't laughter.
He never saw Molly again.
Loss is not without its curious advantages for the artist. Major traumatic breaks are pretty common in the biographies of artists I respect.