# Quote — William Gibson, Neuromancer

> “So if Wintermute's backing the whole show, it's paying us to burn it…burning itself?"
>
> "Real motive problem, with an AI," the construct said. "Not human…Me, I'm not human either, but I respond like one."
>
> "Are you sentient, or not?"
>
> "Well, it feels like I am, kid, but I'm really just a bunch of ROM. It's one of them philosophical questions, I guess…But I ain't likely to write you no poem. Your AI, it just might. But it ain't no way human…[Does] it own itself?"
>
> "Swiss citizen," Case said, "but T-A owns the basic software and the mainframe."
>
> "That's a good one. Like, 'I own your brain and what you know, but your thoughts have Swiss citizenship.' Sure. Lotsa luck, AI."

- Author: [William Gibson](https://www.leafyquotes.com/william-gibson.md)
- Book: [Neuromancer](https://www.leafyquotes.com/william-gibson/neuromancer.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sprawl_trilogy#Part_Three:_Midnight_in_the_Rue_Jules_Verne) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/william-gibson/neuromancer/so-if-wintermutes

## More from this book

> Smith had a visitor, unannounced…A small man, Japanese, enormously polite, who bore all the marks of a vat-grown ninja assassin. Smith sat very still, staring into the calm brown eyes of death across a polished table of Vietnamese rosewood. Gently, almost apologetically, the cloned killer explained that it was his duty to find and return a certain artwork, a mechanism of great beauty, which had been taken from the house of his master.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/william-gibson/neuromancer/smith-had-a-visitor.md)

> "I got a little story for you about them…Haven't ever told anybody this one," the Finn began.
>
> The story he told Case and Molly began with another man's story, a man he called Smith. Smith had come to the Finn with a request for help, a fraternal request, one businessman to another.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/william-gibson/neuromancer/i-got-a-little.md)

> He was less than a block from Deane's office when it hit, the sudden cellular awareness that someone was on his ass, and very close. The cultivation of a certain tame paranoia was something Case took for granted.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/william-gibson/neuromancer/he-was-less.md)