William Gibson Quotes

Reality is contradictory. And it's paradoxical.

The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.

The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.

Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America - that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement.

Change, like sunshine, can be a friend or a foe, a blessing or a curse, a dawn or a dusk.

Everything changes.

Progress knows nothing of fixity. It cannot be pressed into a definite mould…. Progress is ever renewing, ever becoming, ever changing--never is it within the law.

A wise king must do less in altering his laws than he may; for new government is ever dangerous …

When something is new, it creates a new kind of fear.

In the entertainment industry, there remains one constant: change.

Doubt is important because it suggests progress. Total certainty can mean there's no assessment of things. Doubt, if you don't panic, can allow newness to come in and challenge something that's an established mode.

I'm all about polarities and juxtapositions.

I spent a good amount of time with David Bowie, and I was talking about getting the band back together. He said, 'Does it make you uncomfortable?' I said 'Yeah,', and he said, 'Good. It should. You should be uncomfortable.'

I've never been interested in pure movement or pure stability, but in the unstable.

Life really is a series of contrasts.

In the contradiction lies the hope.

The only laws are paradox, humor and change.

Fashion is about two things: the evolution and the opposite.

Change terrifies people. They like new, but they don't like new with change.

When there's change, there's opportunity.

So the more things remain the same, the more they change after all.

The same sun that hardens the clay softens the wax.

In this speedy world of ours when facts are multiplying rapidly and giant rearrangements are happening all around us, it seems dangerous to be made nervous by the new - to want what we can never have, to want things not to be rearranged. It would be better to be able to take the leap, which is to be able not only to live with change and newness, but even to help make it.

And if things always stayed the same, Scarlett, what would be the reason for bothering to draw breath?

Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.