William Gibson Quotes

If only America would realize that the art of Europe is finished - dead - and that America is the country of the art of the future, instead of trying to base everything she does on European traditions!

Everything's so commercialised it shuts down the underground.

I think, in history, everything is about the remix.

In art, there are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiarists. And in the end, doesn't the revolutionary's work become official, once the State takes it over?

Popular culture has become engorged, broadening and thickening until it's the only culture anyone notices.

There's a million new people in the studio every day creating new stuff so I really had to be on my toes with this one so I could get it out before somebody else could.

A lot of art and visual crafts are based on appropriating things.

In a way I spend my entire life stealing from everything - from the past, from cities I love, from where I grew up - grabbing things, taking not only from architecture but from Italy, art, writing, poetry, music.

Our influences are who we are. It's rare that anything is an absolutely pure vision; even Daniel Johnston sounds like the Beatles. And that's the problem with the bands I'm always asked about, the ones derivative of the early Seattle sound. They don't dilute their influences enough.

I find pop art really offensive because it's taking a piece of popular culture and putting it somewhere where people can't see it.

I think the merging of high and low culture is so fascinating.

Coming from The Disney Channel, anything I do is going to offend somehow, somewhere, somehow.

I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

You just never know when today's cultural outcasts will become tomorrow's cultural icons.

I'd have to say that it kills me that there's a concern that 'Torchwood' has gone to America to become Americanised.

The value of kitsch exists in its novelty and in its connotations to more legitimate counterparts.

Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there's no fitting into it now.

I think there's the apparent lack of subtlety and sort of make-believe anti-sensibility connected with American art. I think this is a style, and it does relate to our culture, and I think it would be anachronistic maybe to pretend to be involved with subtle changes and modulations and things like that, because it's really not part of America.

I've been criticized by my generation, artists from the '70s - and there's nothing more tragic than artists from the '70s still doing art from the '70s - because I blur all these borders between fashion and pop.

One of the questions that has most bothered me in my reflections on culture is the question of kitsch. Just what is it? When did it begin? And why?

In general, both in Spanish and English, the quality of the entertainment media is horrible.

The '90s was a decade of mundane market-consumer nothingness where there was nothing coming up from the streets; you just had someone in an office deciding what was cool.

I never set out to be a groundbreaking artist in the sense of doing something that's never been done before. I set out to make stuff that communicated quickly and effectively, playing off of advertising, pop art, and pop culture.

Class doesn't create culture anymore.

That's just the way the world's going - everything has to be so instantly commercial that it kills anything that's a little bit underground instantly.