William Gibson

Quotes

1. “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.”

2. 

   So it's entirely fair to say, and I've said it before, that the way Neuromancer-the-novel "looks" was influenced in large part by some of the artwork I saw in Heavy Metal. I assume that this must also be true of John Carpenter's Escape from New York, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, and all other artifacts of the style sometimes dubbed "cyberpunk." Those French guys, they got their end in early.

3. 

   "How smart's an AI, Case?" "Depends. Some aren't much smarter than dogs. Pets. Cost a fortune anyway. The real smart ones are as smart as the Turing heat is willing to let 'em get." "Look, you're a cowboy. How come you aren't just flat-out fascinated with those things." "Well," he said, "for starts, they're rare. Most of them are military, the bright ones, and we can't crack the ice. That's where ice all comes from, you know? And then there's the Turing cops, and that's bad heat..."

4. 

   They sent a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT. He didn't see it coming.

5. 

   "Family organization. Corporate structure," the Finn said. "Supposedly you can buy into an S.A., but there hasn't been a share of Tessier-Ashpool traded on the open market in over a hundred years. You're looking at a very quiet, very eccentric first-generation high-orbit family. Big money, very shy of media. Lot of cloning."

6. 

   Somewhere down in the Sprawl's ferro-concrete roots, a train drove a column of stale air through a tunnel.

7. 

   "How old are you, boss?"

   "Old enough to know that you are fucked, burnt, that this is over and you are in the way."

   "One thing," Case said, and drew on his cigarette. He blew the smoke up at the Turing Registry agent. "Do you guys have any real jurisdiction out here? I mean, shouldn't you have the Freeside security team in on this party? It's their turf, isn't it?" He saw the dark eyes harden in the lean boy face and tensed for the blow, but Pierre only shrugged.

   "It doesn't matter," Roland said. "You will come with us. We are at home with situations of legal ambiguity. The treaties under which our arm of the Registry operates grant us a great deal of flexibility. And we _create_ flexibility, in situations where it is required." The mask of amiability was down, suddenly, Roland's eyes as hard as Pierre's.

8. 

   In Heathrow a vast chunk of memory detached itself from a blank bowl of airport sky and fell on him. He vomited into a blue plastic container without breaking stride. When he arrived at the counter at the end of corridor, he changed his ticket.

9. 

   The two surviving Founders of Zion were…old with the accelerated aging that overtakes men who spend too many years outside the embrace of gravity.

   “Steppin' Razor," one said, as Molly drifted into the chamber. “Like unto a whippin' stick."

   “That is a story we have, sister," said the other, “a religion story."

   “How come you don't talk the patois?" Molly asked.

   “I came from Los Angeles. Long time ago, up the gravity well and out of Babylon. To lead the Tribes home. Now my brother likens you to Steppin' Razor."

   Molly extended her right hand and the blades flashed in the smoky air. The other Founder laughed, his head thrown back.

   “You bring a scourge on Babylon, sister, on its darkest heart."

10. 

    The Panther Moderns, Case had decided, were a contemporary version of the Big Scientists of his own late teens. There was a kind of ghostly teenage DNA at work in the Sprawl, something that carried the coded precepts of various short-lived sub cults and replicated them at odd intervals…It was the style that mattered and the style was the same. The Moderns were mercenaries, practical jokers, nihilistic technofetishists…

    "You can't let the little pricks generation-gap you," Molly said.

11. 

    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.

12. 

    Archipelago. The islands. Torus, spindle, cluster. Freeside is many things, not all of them evident to the tourists who shuttle up and down the well. Freeside is brothel and banking nexus, pleasure dome and free port, border town, and spa. Freeside is Las Vegas and the hanging gardens of Babylon, an orbital Geneva and home to a family inbred and most carefully refined, the industrial clan of Tessier and Ashpool.