William Gibson

Human in every detail but then not so…He could see celebrity here, not like Kathy’s idea of a primal substance, but as a paradoxical quality inherent in the substance of the world. He saw that the quantity of data accumulated here by the band’s fans was much greater than everything the band themselves had ever generated. And their actual art, the music and the videos, was the merest fragment of that.

Specialist dealers wanted low wholesale, basically, so they could whip the big markup to collectors. If you were a collector, Fontaine figured, specialist dealers were nature’s way of telling you you had too much money to begin with.

The knife's plain haft, against his ribs, through a starched evening shirt.

The handles of a craftman’s tools bespeak an absolute simplicity, the plainest forms affording the greatest range of possibilities for the user’s hand.

That which is overdesigned, too highly specific, anticipates outcome; the anticipation of outcome guarantees, if not failure, the absence of grace.

The past is past, the future unformed.

There is only the moment, and that is where he prefers to be.

The women wore clothes Chevette had only seen in magazines. Rich people, had to be, and foreign, too. Though maybe rich was foreign enough.

“Jesus, Berry, you shouldn’t oughta watch TV, not unless you’re gonna pay it attention.”

His sister had come over here in 1994, and then he'd come himself, to get away from all the trouble over there. Never regretted it. Said this was a fine country except they let in too many immigrants.

There’s only but two kinds of people. People can afford hotels like that, they’re one kind. We’re the other. Used to be, like, a middle class, people in between. But not anymore.

The rich and the famous, Kathy had once said, were seldom that way by accident. It was possible to be one or the other, but very seldom, accidentally, to be both.

As new technologies search out and lace over every interstice in the net of global communication, we find ourselves with increasingly less excuse for...slack. And that, I would argue, is what the World Wide Web, the test pattern for whatever will become the dominant global medium, offers us. Today, in its clumsy, larval, curiously innocent way, it offers us the opportunity to waste time...It will probably evolve into something considerably less random, and less fun — we seem to have a knack for that — but in the meantime, in its gloriously unsorted Global Ham Television Postcard Universes phase, surfing the Web is a procrastinator's dream. And people who see you doing it might even imagine you're working.

Vasopressin makes you remember, I mean really remember. Clinically they use the stuff to counter senile amnesia, but the street finds its own uses for things.

“Surfing the Web” (as dubious a metaphor as “the information highway”) is, as a friend of mine has it, “like reading magazines with the pages stuck together.” My wife shakes her head in dismay as I patiently await the downloading of some Japanese Beatles fan's personal catalog of bootlegs. “But it’s from Japan!” She isn't moved. She goes out to enjoy the flowers in her garden.