William Gibson Quotes

The only thing simple about the past is that it's not now.

The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.

You can never figure out what the future sounds like. As soon as you make it, it's the past.

What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?

I am interested in the past. Perhaps one of the reasons is we cannot make, cannot change the past. I mean you can hardly unmake the present. But the past after all is merely to say a memory, a dream. You know my own past seems continually changed when I am remembering it, or reading things that are interesting to me.

It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.

The results would have stayed on the watch face until the batteries died. But trying to make time stand still this way would have been a mistake. It is just as important to erase times eventually as to save them at first.

We must remember that as the centuries go by, time will pass.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

There is always something rather absurd about the past.

One feels that the past stays the way you left it, whereas the present is in constant movement; it's unstable all around you.

We can change everything but we can't stop time.

It is all falling indelibly into the past.

The momentum of time is always going forward. You cannot repeat what has been done before. You can't go back.

Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.

With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta's arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.

The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.

Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

The past has an undeniable grip on everyone, except, perhaps, amnesiacs.

Most of the lyrics are over a year old, and it doesn't feel like it's about me. Time created a distance.

But where are the snows of yester year?

If I've learned one thing in life, it's you can never go back.

Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold.

There is no fence nor hedge round time that is gone. You can go back and have what you like of it if you can remember.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.