William Gibson Quotes

It is impossible for you to take power over the future because it isn't even real...

People have reflected on the quality of time ever since they've been writing. I suppose I have thought about and written about the question of living in the present - but it only lasts for an instant, and then everything becomes the past. The future, you know nothing about, except for some anticipations you have.

Tomorrow doesn't really exist.

The future is unwritten. there are best case scenarios. There are worst-case scenarios. both of them are great fun to write about if you' re a science fiction novelist, but neither of them ever happens in the real world. What happens in the real world is always a sideways-case scenario. World-changing marvels to us, are only wallpaper to our children.

Science fiction, as I mentioned before, writes about what is neither impossible nor possible; the fact is that, when the question of possibility comes up in science fiction, the author can only reply that nobody knows. We haven't been there yet. We haven't discovered that yet. Science fiction hasn't happened.

We're all just memories of our future selves.

Fiction offers escape but it also interrogates the world we live in, whether the past, present or future.

If the future and the past really exist, where are they?

That's a cute sentence: the years to come. Why are you so sure they're coming?

I thought of the future, and spoke of the past.

We are what we seem to be.

Most of the time one night blends into the next and weeks blend into weeks and months into other months. And sooner or later we all die. But at the beginning of the night anything’s possible.

Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection.

Science fiction can be exciting and very gripping, but it doesn't tell us anything about the universe in which we live.

I'm comfortable with time. Time will change.

It was one of those moments when you feel the future so much that it humbles the present.

The only time a dead certainty applies is in a dream world.

Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory.

May you look back on the past with as much pleasure as you look forward to the future.

Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.

I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin.

Today's science fiction is tomorrow's science fact.

If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.

I don't know whether we will find ourselves in the cross hairs, pulled by the short hairs, or just trying to find the next inane hairstyle. But change is coming; it is inevitable. It is as steady and reliable as a ticking clock.

The past is always tense, the future perfect.