William Gibson Quotes

Being a writer of fiction isn't like being a compulsive liar, honestly.

When you write, you want to get rid of the world, don’t you? Of course you do. When you’re writing, you’re creating your own worlds.

Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.

Mostly it's lies, writing novels. You set out to tell an untrue story and you try to make it believable, even to yourself. Which calls for details; any good lie does.

A writer of fiction is really... a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

Novel-writing is, for the novelist, a game of let's pretend.

What is the difference between the novelist and the liar? At some moments, I have often wondered.

Like all novelists, I'm interested in the filters between reality and the imagination.

I get a lot of energy from making things up, which is why I feel I'm a novelist.

It’s not a lie. It’s a gift for fiction.

If you get bored with nothing to do, you are not a writer ... We are in the business of reproducing reality from nothing. We are the biggest liars in the world, seeking truth.

Lie. Put down on paper the most interesting lies you can imagine. . .and then make them plausible.

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

Poets themselves, tho' liars by profession, always endeavour to give an air of truth to their fictions.

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to entertain, to make things up. The art of what I do lies not in research or even recollection but primarily in invention.

Fiction is the most joyous, beautiful, sophisticated, wonderful thing in the world.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!

People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.

You're a writer. Make it up.

I suppose I am a born novelist, for the things I imagine are more vital and vivid to me than the things I remember.

Fiction writing is a strange business when you think about it. You sit down and weave a network of lies to explore deeper truths.

I was never a good journalist, because I would make things up. A lot of people frowned on that, which is why I ended up in fiction.