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I've Gone To Big Stadium Rock Concerts At Some Artist's Invitation, And There's This Invariable, Fascinating And Rather Sad Situation Of Concentric Circles Of Availability. There Are Green Rooms Within Green Rooms Literally Within Green Rooms. There Are Seven Or Eight Degrees Of Exclusivity, And Within Each Circle Of Exclusivity, Everyone Is So Happy To Be There, And They Don't Know That The Next Level Exists.

-William Gibson

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I've Gone To Big

William Gibson

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I've Gone To Big Stadium Rock Concerts At Some Artist's Invitation, And There's This Invariable, Fascinating And Rather Sad Situation Of Concentric Circles Of Availability. There Are Green Rooms Within Green Rooms Literally Within Green Rooms. There Are Seven Or Eight Degrees Of Exclusivity, And Within Each Circle Of Exclusivity, Everyone Is So Happy To Be There, And They Don't Know That The Next Level Exists.

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The Most Common Human Act That Writing A Novel Resembles Is Lying. The Working Novelist Lies Daily, Very Complexly, And At Great Length.

When I Was A Child, Science Fiction Was The First Source I've Found For Information. Science Fiction Was A Very Very Low Cultural Stream In Those Days. It Was Completly Below The Radar And No One Bothered To Censurate It.

Secrets...are The Very Root Of Cool.

I Watch For Emergent Technologies And Pay Attention To What People Say They'll Be Good For, Then See What We Actually Use Them For. It Never Occurred To Me That A Tiny Telephone With A Wireless Transceiver Would Do Whatever It Is That It's Done To Us.

Somehow I Think That If Toronto Had Been Forced To Wait A Decade [from 80th], It Would Be A Better Looking City.

The 'net Is A Waste Of Time.

I Assume That - Because You Can Get Degrees In Journalism From Very Reputable Universities - I Assume That People Can Be Trained To Be Journalists. I've Never Been Entirely Certain That Anyone Can Be Trained To Be A Novelist In The Same Way.

I Suppose I Do The Japanese Because I Just Don't Know China. Chinese Popular Culture Has Never Evoked That Instant Of, "whoah! What's That?" That I Have With Japanese Popular Culture.

One Of The Things I Have Taken For Granted, In Terms Of How Technology Works In The World, Is The People That Develop It And Get It Out There Don't Really Know What We Are Going To Do With Until We Have Really Gotten Ahold Of It And It Has Become Ubiquitous. And Then We Wind Up Doing Things That Its Inventors Never Dreamed Of And Those Things Become The Real Change Drivers. That Is Actually Where The Whole Technocracy Thing Falls Apart For Me, Because The People Who Invented It Can't Predict What We're Going To Do With It.

I Was Travelling With Bruce Sterling On Our Mutual Difference Engine Tour And He Became Aware From The Experience Of Travelling With Me That I Would Distinguish Among The Shoes In A Perfectly Normal Fashion, But Form Him It Was A Revelation. There's A Very Lyrical Passage In Holy Fire About Old Wealthy European Men And Their Shoes, And How Beautiful Their Shoes Are, And How There Have Never Been Shoes As Beautiful. I Think That That Was Probably As Close As Bruce Will Ever Get To Homage In My Direction. I Made Him Aware Of Footwear Fashion.

I Like Living In Vancouver .it's More A Matter Of Being A Vancouver Loyalist. Harking Back To What I Said About Growing Up With The Inherent Violence In The Southern U.s., I'm Deeply Enamoured Of, And Entirely Used To Living In A Society With Gun Laws Akin To Those Of A Scandinavian Social Democracy .it's A Good Thing.

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There Are Bits Of The Literal Future Right Here, Right Now, If You Know How To Look For Them.

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The Construct Of William Gibson The Writer Is Coming Down, And Become More Open. It's More Of A Glasnost - Transparency! Transparency Is What It Is.

I Had A List Of Things That Science Fiction, Particularly American Science Fiction, To Me Seemed To Do With Tedious Regularity. One Was To Not Have Strong Female Protagonists. One Was To Envision The Future, Whatever It Was, As America.

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I Think Science Fiction Gives Us A Wonderful Toolkit To Disassemble And Reexamine This Kind Of Incomprehensible, Constantly Changing Present That We Live In, That We Often Live In Quite Uncomfortably.

The Present Tense Made Him Nervous.

I Had A Lot Of Issues With The Genre, And I Probably Even Had Issues With The Whole Idea Of Genre. I Was Coming Into It With A Certain Degree Of Outsider Attitude, And I Didn't Have A Long-term Plan. But I Think The Way It's Worked Out, It's Sort Of Warped Into What I Suppose You Could Say Is My Own Genre. If People Like My Books, They Have Some Idea Of What The Next One Will Be Like.

Stand High Long Enough And Your Lightning Will Come.

I'm Interested In People Who Become Culturally Fluent. And When I Meet Young People I'm Often Amazed They Don't Quite Seem To Have A Sense Of Where They're From. They're Like The Citizens Of The Airport.

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The Sky Above The Port Was The Color Of Television, Tuned To A Dead Station.

The Internet Is Part Of This Ongoing, Species-long Project We've Been Working On Since We Climbed Down Out Of The Trees In The Savanna. We've Been Working On It Without Really Knowing It.

A Book Exists At The Intersection Of The Author's Subconscious And The Reader's Response.

When I Start Writing A New Imaginary Future, I Have No Idea What It Is. The Characters Arrive First. They Help Me Figure Out Where They Are Living And I Get To Fill In The Gaps With That And Where We Are. So When I Get To The End Of The Process Of Composition, If I Feel That I Have Really Done My Job, I Have No Idea What I've Got - And I Then Spend Essentially The Rest Of My Life Figuring Out What It Might Mean.

The Future Is Already Upon Us, It Is Just Unevenly Distributed.

My Dream Scenario Would Be That You Could Go Into A Bookshop, Examine Copies Of Every Book In Print That They're Able To Offer, Then For A Fee Have Them Produce In A Minute Or Two A Beautiful Finished Copy In A Dust Jacket That You Would Pay For And Take Home.

Naps Are Essential To My Process. Not Dreams, But That State Adjacent To Sleep, The Mind On Waking.

I Think That Technologies Are Morally Neutral Until We Apply Them. It's Only When We Use Them For Good Or For Evil That They Become Good Or Evil.

I Have Always Been Intensely Uncomfortable With The Idea Of A Science Fiction Writer As Prophet. Not That There Haven't Been Science Fiction Writers Who Think Of Themselves As Having Some Sort Of Prophetic Role, But When I Think Of That, I Always Think Of H.g. Wells - He Would Think Of What Was Going To Happen, And He Would Imagine How It Would Happen, And Then He Would Create A Fiction To Illustrate The Idea That He'd Had. And No Part Of My Process Has Ever Resembled That At All.

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[when] Johnny Mnemonic Was Coming Out And I Realized That All The Kids That Worked In 7-11 Knew More - Or Thought They Knew More - About Feature Film Production Than I Did. And That Was From Reading Premiere, That Was From This Change That Came From Magazines That Treat Their Readers As Players. Magazines That Purport To Sell You The Inside Experience.

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I Find It Interesting To See People - Mostly People Who Are Younger Than I Am - Going To Considerable Trouble To Try To Reproduce Things From An Era That Was Far More Physical, From A Less Virtual Day.

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The Simpson's In Piccadilly Has Been Turned Into The Largest Bookstore In All Of Europe! How Can They Fill It? All Of These Purpose-built Borders And Chapters And Every New Mall That Goes Up Has A Giant Chain Bookstore With A Purpose-built Author Reading Space, Whoah, What's Gong On There.

If Ignorance Were Enough To Make Things Not Exist, The World Would Be More Like A Lot Of People Think It Is. But It's Not. And It's Not.

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The Written Word Still Enjoyed A Certain Prestige Here. It Was A Sluggish Country.

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This Perpetual Toggling Between Nothing Being New, Under The Sun, And Everything Having Very Recently Changed, Absolutely, Is Perhaps The Central Driving Tension Of My Work.

I Have Friends Who Go [tokyo] Frequently On Business, And It Sounds Interesting. I've Heard That They Have For The First Time Serious Drug Problems.

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He Took A Duck In The Face At 250 Knots.

I Can't Imagine Writing A Book Without Some Strong Female Characters, Unless That Was A Demand Of The Setting. I Actually Tend To Suspect That In Real Life, There Have Always Been Very Strong Female Characters, But At Certain Stages Of Society, They've Been Asked To Cool It.

Maybe I've Been A Small Part Of The Democratisation Of Celebrity, Because I've Been Fascinated By It, And When It Started To Happen To Me To The Very Limited Extent That It Happens To Writers In North America, I Was Exposed To People Who Had The Disease Of Celebrity. People Who Had Raging, Raging, Life-threatening Celebrity, People Who Would Be In Danger If They Were Left Alone On The Street Without Their Minders. It's A Great Anthropological Privilege To Be There.

I Think The Least Important Thing About Science Fiction For Me Is Its Predictive Capacity.

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The Box Was A Universe, A Poem, Frozen On The Boundaries Of Human Experience.

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I Don't Always Like Writing, But I Very Much Like Having Written.

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People Who Feel Safer With A Gun Than With Guaranteed Medical Insurance Don't Yet Have A Fully Adult Concept Of Scary.

I Only Go To Japan When There's Someone Who Can Afford To Bring Me There, And Consequently I May Never Go Again!

I'm A Really Good Eavesdropper. I Listen To What People Say And Remember All The Buzzwords.

His Smile Was The Nightmare In My Back Pocket.(speaking About Ronald Reagan)

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Some People Dote On Contemplating Disasters.

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Canadian Cities Looked The Way American Cities Did On Television.

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Language Is To The Mind More Than Light Is To The Eye.

To The Very Limited Extent That I Have A Political Consciousness, To Some Extent I'm A Lazy, Apolitical Sort Of Guy That Just Flits Around.

Novels Set In Imaginary Futures Are Necessarily About The Moment In Which They Are Written.

We Monitor Many Frequencies. We Listen Always. Came A Voice, Out Of The Babel Of Tongues, Speaking To Us. It Played Us A Mighty Dub.

There Must Be Some Tommy Hilfiger Event Horizon, Beyond Which It Is Impossible To Be More Derivative, More Removed From The Source, More Devoid Of Soul.

There's An Idea Called "gray Man", In The Security Business, That I Find Interesting. They Teach People To Dress Unobtrusively. Chinos Instead Of Combat Pants, And If You Really Need The Extra Pockets, A Better Design Conceals Them. They Assume, Actually, That The Bad Guys Will Shoot All The Guys Wearing Combat Pants First, Just To Be Sure.

I'm A Reluctant Writer Of Non-fiction, In Part Because I Don't Really Feel Qualified.

I'd Always Maintained That Much Of The Anarchy And Craziness Of The Early Internet Had A Lot To Do With The Fact That Governments Just Hadn't Realised It Was There.

He'd Been Numb A Long Time, Years. All His Nights Down Ninsei, His Nights With Linda, Numb In Bed And Numb At The Cold Sweating Center Of Every Drug Deal. But Now He'd Found This Warm Thing, This Chip Of Murder. Meat, Some Part Of Him Said. It's The Meat Talking, Ignore It.

It's An American Thing, But It's Particularly A Southern Thing, And Its Romanticization Is Hyper-southern. And It's Still Irresistible To Me, Even In Middle Age. There's Something That Pulls Me To That, But At The Same Time, I Have This Increasing Awareness Of How Banal It Really Is - That Evil Is Inherently Banal.

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I Don't Have To Write About The Future. For Most People, The Present Is Enough Like The Future To Be Pretty Scary.

Friday, August 04, 2006 Monument Posted 8:31 Am Silver Nitrous Girls Pointed Into Occult Winds Of Porn And Destiny.

The Deadliest Bullshit Is Odorless, And Transparent.

Dreaming In Public Is An Important Part Of Our Job Description.

Occasionally If I Look Back At Something I've Written I'll Find One Of Those That I Don't Understand, But That's A Bad Thing - The Unconscious Has Dealt Me A Bad Hand.

Lost, So Small Amid That Dark, Hands Grown Cold, Body Image Fading Down Corridors Of Television Sky.

I Don't Much Live My Life As If I Was Living In A Raymond Chandler Novel, Which Is Probably A Good Thing.

We Have No Future Because Our Present Is Too Volatile. We Have Only Risk Management. The Spinning Of The Given Moment's Scenarios. Pattern Recognition.

I Can't Imagine Writing A Book Without Some Strong Female Characters, Unless That Was A Demand Of The Setting.

If You’re Fifteen Or So, Today, I Suspect That You Inhabit A Sort Of Endless Digital Now, A State Of Atemporality Enabled By Our Increasingly Efficient Communal Prosthetic Memory. I Also Suspect That You Don’t Know It, Because, As Anthropologists Tell Us, One Cannot Know One’s Own Culture.

When Did It Become Necessary To Explain What's So Cool About Japan? Everyone Was Quite Obsessed With It 15 Years Ago. I Suppose It's The Only Asian Country That Developed An Imaginary Entree To Me. That's Why I Go Back.

I've Always Assumed From The Beginning That I Had Relatively Few Contemporaries Among My Readership. Not That I Was Consciously Writing For A Younger Audience But That What I Was Doing Interested A Younger Audience, Or At Least Threatened Them Less.

Fiction Is An Illusion Wrought With Many Small, Conventionally Symbolic Marks, Triggering Visions In The Minds Of Others

It Was Hot, The Night We Burned Chrome.

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Every Shop In Every High Street In Europe Is Filled With Basically The Same Stuff. There's A Street In Every City Of The World That Has A Gap And Benneton's, And The Upscale Versions Of Those.

Sometimes, I Feel Like A Time Traveller, Cause The Only Way That We Can Really Travel In Time Is Just To Get Older.

Why Shouldn't We Give Our Teachers A License To Obtain Software, All Software, Any Software, For Nothing? Does Anyone Demand A Licensing Fee, Each Time A Child Is Taught The Alphabet?

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I Guess Twitter Is The First Thing That Has Been Attractive To Me As Social Media. I Never Felt The Least Draw To Facebook Or Myspace. I've Been Involved Anonymously In Some Tiny Listservs, Mainly In My Ceaseless Quest For Random Novelty, And Sometimes While Doing Something That More Closely Resembles Research.

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I've Been Through The Whole Western World, And It Seems To Me That There's More Retail Floor Space Devoted To The Sale Of Books Than Food! There's More Retail Floor Space Devoted To The Sale Of Books Than There's Been In The Entire History Of Humanity! It's Grotesque!

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I Don't Think We Know Yet What Broadcast Television Did To Us, Although It Obviously Did Lots. I Don't Think We're Far Enough Away From It Yet To Really Get A Handle On It. We Get These Things, I Think They Start Changing Us Right Away, We Don't Notice We're Changing. Our Perception Of The Whole Thing Shifts, And Then We're In The New Way Of Doing Things, And We Take It For Granted.

Cyberspace Is Where You Are When You're On The Telephone.

There Is Always A Point At Which The Terrorist Ceases To Manipulate The Media Gestalt. A Point At Which The Violence May Well Escalate, But Beyond Which The Terrorist Has Become Symptomatic Of The Media Gestalt Itself. Terrorism As We Ordinarily Understand It Is Innately Media-related.

All My Life I've Encountered People Who Were Obsessed With One Particular Class Of Object Or Experience, Who Were Constantly Pursuing That Thing. Since I Was A Little Kid, I Hadn't Afforded Myself The Opportunity, I Guess, To Have A Hobby.

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Somewhere, Deep Within Her, Surfaces A Tiny Clockwork Submarine. There Are Times When You Can Only Take The Next Step. And Then Another.

The Street Has Its Own Use For Things.

I Think With One Exception I've Never Changed An Opening Sentence After A Book Was Completed.

The Future's Here Already. It's Just Unevenly Distributed.

I'm Happiest With People Who've Gotten Furthest From Traditional Ideas Of Nationalism.

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I Think The Least Important Thing About Science Fiction For Me Is Its Predictive Capacity. Its Record For Being Accurately Predictive Is Really, Really Poor! If You Look At The Whole History Of Science Fiction, What People Have Said Is Going To Happen, What Writers Have Said Is Going To Happen, And What Actually Happened - It's Terrible.

"authenticity" Doesn't Mean Much To Me. I Just Want "good", In The Sense Of Well-designed, Well-constructed, Long-lasting Garments. My Interest In Military Clothing Stems From That. It's Not About Macho, Playing Soldiers, Anything Militaristic. It's The Functionality, The Design-solutions, The Durability. Likewise Workwear.

"cyberspace Is Everting." It's Interpenetrating Our Everyday Reality To The Point That On-line Is Our Normal Waking State.

We See In Order To Move; We Move In Order To See.

You Needed A New Pancreas. The One We Bought For You Frees You From A Dangerous Dependency.” “thanks, But I Was Enjoying That Dependency.

I'm Quite Good Friends With The Putative Director, Vincenzo Natali, And I'm A Big Fan Of His Work, But Beyond That, I Don't Like To Talk About Other People's Work Work-in-progress.

The Experience Of Celebrity Is Gradually Being Democratized.

The Past Is Past, The Future Unformed. There Is Only The Moment, And That Is Where He Prefers To Be.

I Don't Generate A Storyline And Then Fill It Out In The Course Of Writing. The Story Actually Generates In The Course Of The Writing. It's One Of The Reasons I've Never Been Comfortable Doing Screenplays, Because In Order To Get The Contract For The Screenplay, You Have To Sit Down And Tell Them What's Going To Happen.

I Think That I've Always Written About Things That Are Very Personal, But Initially, I Coded Everything. I Buried Everything Under Layers And Layers And Layers Of Code, But The Signifiers Of My Emotionality Were There For Me. I Knew Where The Magnets Were, Behind The Gyprock, And The Magnets Were Very Powerful. I Think They Had To Be Powerful For Me, Otherwise The Reader Wouldn't Have A Reciprocal Experience.

I Think The Large Part Of The Function Of The Internet Is It Is Archival. It's Unreliable To The Extent That Word On The Street Is Unreliable. It's No More Unreliable Than That. You Can Find The Truth On The Street If You Work At It. I Don't Think Of The Internet Or The Virtual As Being Inherently Inferior To The So-called Real.

Twitter Is The Only Brand Of Social Media That I Have Ever Taken To At All. I Like The Feeling Of Having My Perception Of The World Expanded Daily, 24/7, By Being Able To Monitor The Reactions Of 100-and-some People Throughout The World That I Personally Follow So I Have Some Sense Of Who They Are. There Has Never Really Been Anything Like That Before, At Least In Terms Of The Digestible 140-character Bandwidth That Twitter Is Based On. I Am Able To Wake Up, Open Twitter, And Sort Of Glance Across The Psychic State Of The Planet.

I Think That The Collectible Ephemera Craze/awareness Is Probably Driven By A Reverse Market, Rebounding Off The Sense Of Everything Being Mass-produced. It's The Last Step You Take In Trying To Find Something Unique.

What We're Doing Pop Culturally Is Like Burning The Rain Forest. The Biodiversity Of Pop Culture Is Really, Really In Danger.

Time Moves In One Direction, Memory In Another.

His Eyes Were Eggs Of Unstable Crystal, Vibrating With A Frequency Whose Name Was Rain And The Sound Of Trains, Suddenly Sprouting A Humming Forest Of Hair-fine Glass Spines.

If I Were In Severely Straitened Socio-economic Circumstances And Had To Move To The U.s., I'd Probably Opt For Athens, Ga, Or Lawrence, Ks. As Boho Guys Usually Do, Live Cheap In The Left Bank Of Kansas.

A Graphic Representation Of Data Abstracted From The Banks Of Every Computer In The Human System. Unthinkable Complexity. Lines Of Light Ranged In The Nonspace Of The Mind, Clusters And Constellations Of Data. Like City Lights, Receding.

To Present A Whole World That Doesn’t Exist And Make It Seem Real, We Have To More Or Less Pretend We’re Polymaths. That’s Just The Act Of All Good Writing.

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I'm Quite Proud Of What I Anticipated About Reality Television From My Books In The Early '90s, Which I Based On The Early Seasons Of 'cops' And On The Amazing Stuff I Had Read About Happening On Japanese Shows And The British 'big Brother'.

[i've Gone To Big Stadium Rock Concerts At Some Artist's Invitation], And Eventually You Find Yourself In The Room With The Radiant Being Around Whom All This Is Revolving. It's Very Bizarre, And It's Quasi-religious, Or Possibly Genuinely Religious. Spooky. It's A Spooky And Interesting Thing.

I Would Like To Design What People Generally Call Streetwear. I'd Like To Dress Skateboarders, Or Whatever The Older Equivalent Of Skateboarders Are. I Pay More Attention To That Stuff Than Anyone Would Ever Imagine Because I'm Watching What The Designers Do.

To The Extent That I Can Still Believe In Bohemia, Which I Think Is Very Important To Me In Some Way That I Don't Yet Really Understand, To The Extent That I Still Believe In That, I Have To Believe That There Are Viable Degrees Of Freedom Inherent If Not Realized In Interstitial Areas.

We Live In An Age Of Seriously Crap Mass Clothing. They've Made A Science Of It.

We're Living In A Future That's Weirder Than Anybody Except Possibly.

If There's A Movie Of Neuromancer, What I Really Want The Special Effects Guys To Do Is Make You See, From Case's Point Of View, The Little Acid Giggies: The Little Lines And Trails Coming Off Of Things.

His Teeth Sang In Their Individual Sockets Like Tuning Forks, Each One Pitch-perfect And Clear As Ethanol.

I'm Often Saddened And Dismayed To See Myself Portrayed As Either A Luddite Or As A Raving Technophile. I've Always Thought That My Job Was To Be As Anthropologically Neutral About Emerging Technologies As Possible.

All The Speed He Took, All The Turns He'd Taken And The Corners He'd Cut In Night City, And Still He'd See The Matrix In His Sleep, Bright Lattices Of Logic Unfolding Across That Colorless Void.

As A Writer Of Fiction Who Deals With Technology, I Necessarily Deal With The History Of Technology And The History Of Technologically Induced Social Change. I Roam Up And Down It In A Kind Of Special Way Because I Roam Down It Into History, Which Is Invariably Itself A Speculative Affair.

The Future Is Not Google-able.

Futurists Get To A Certain Age And, As One Does, They Suddenly Recognize Their Own Mortality.

I Watch A Sort Of Primitive Form Of The Recommodification Machine Around My Friends And Myself In Sixties, And It Took About Two Years For This Clumsy Mechanism To Get And Try To Sell Us The Monkees. In 1977, It Took About Eight Months For A Slightly Faster More Refined Mechanism To Put Punk In The Window Of Holt Renfrew. It's Gotten Faster Ever Since. The Scene In Seattle That Nirvana Came From: As Soon As It Had A Label, It Was On The Runways Of Paris.there's No Grace Period, So That's A Way In Which I See Us Losing The Interstitial.

You Must Learn To Overcome Your Very Natural And Appropriate Revulsion For Your Own Work.

I Like The Idea Of People Who've Had Some Success In One Form Secretly Wanting To Be Something Else; I Have Some Of That Myself. I Look For It In Other People Who've Established Themselves In Some Particular Art Form, And Then You Find Out That They Really Would Like To Design Running Shoes, Or Edit Literary Magazines Or Something.

I Started Writing Short Fiction Very Briefly, As I Imagine Is The Case For Some Novelists.

I Think I'd Probably Tell You That It's Easier To Desire And Pursue The Attention Of Tens Of Millions Of Total Strangers Than It Is To Accept The Love And Loyalty Of The People Closest To Us.

The Future Has Already Arrived. It's Just Not Evenly Distributed Yet.

I Was Afraid To Watch 'blade Runner' In The Theater Because I Was Afraid The Movie Would Be Better Than What I Myself Had Been Able To Imagine. In A Way, I Was Right To Be Afraid, Because Even The First Few Minutes Were Better.

Addictions [...] Started Out Like Magical Pets, Pocket Monsters. They Did Extraordinary Tricks, Showed You Things You Hadn't Seen, Were Fun. But Came, Through Some Gradual Dire Alchemy, To Make Decisions For You. Eventually, They Were Making Your Most Crucial Life-decisions. And They Were [...] Less Intelligent Than Goldfish.

Three In The Morning. Making Yourself A Cup Of Coffee In The Dark, Using A Flashlight When You Pour The Boiling Water.

'cyberspace' As A Term Is Sort Of Over. It's Over In The Way That, After A Certain Time, People Stopped Using The Suffix '-electro' To Make Things Cool, Because Everything Was Electrical. 'electro' Was All Over The Early 20th Century, And Now It's Gone. I Think 'cyber' Is Sort Of The Same Way.

I Realized That Everyone In Western Society, In Some Weird Way, Believes That They've Had The Experience Of Producing Feature Films.

She Walked On, Comforted By The Surf, By The One Perpetual Moment Of Beach-time, The Now-and-always Of It.

Tim Powers Is A Brilliant Writer.

Dreaming In Public Is An Important Part Of Our Job Description, As Science Writers, But There Are Bad Dreams As Well As Good Dreams. We're Dreamers, You See, But We're Also Realists, Of A Sort.

I Do Not Think An Enormous Permanent Underclass Is A Very Good Thing To Have If You're Attempting To Operate Something That At Least Pretends Sometimes To Be A Democracy.

I Have This Prejudice That Trilogies Are Long, Three-volume Novels.

Generation X Is Dead. It Has Come To Mean Anyone Aged 13 To 55 Years Old.

For Me, The Melancholy Of The Late Xxth Century Is Walking Late At Night By The Mont Blanc Pen Store And Seeing These Things Always Strike Me As Simulacra Of Luxury Items. They Seem Like Fakes.

You Could Have Sex Relatively Comfortably On A Platform Of Books, But Not On A Platform Of Pda.s. Hardcover Books. Paperbacks Might Start Sliding Around. Though I.d Still Prefer Paperbacks To A Pile Of Pda.s.

There's Violence In My Culture [from America's South].

I Don't Begin A Novel With A Shopping List - The Novel Becomes My Shopping List As I Write It.

If Someone Comes In And Says, "what Are You Doing," If I'm Honest, The Answer Is, "i Don't Know. But I'm Doing This, Don't Know Why."

I'm Embarrassed If I Think Anyone Knows Exactly What I Paid For Something, Or Even Where I Got It. I Want What I'm Wearing To Feel Good On, Wear Well, And To Be Extremely Functional.

I Probably Had Something To Do With Being Southern. For Some Reason, Over The Last Few Years I've Been Much More Conscious Of That. It's Probably Because My Friend Jack Womack Has A Thesis That He And I Write The Way We Do Because We're Southern And We Experienced The Very Tail End Of The Premeditated South.

I Worry About What We'll Do In The Future, [about The Instantaneous Co-opting Of Pop Culture]. Where Is Our New Stuff Going To Come From?

All We Really Have When We Pretend To Write About The Future Is The Moment In Which We Are Writing. That's Why Every Imagined Future Obsoletes Like An Ice Cream Melting On The Way Back From The Corner Store.

Cyberspace Is Colonising What We Used To Think Of As The Real World. I Think That Our Grandchildren Will Probably Regard The Distinction We Make Between What We Call The Real World And What They Think Of As Simply The World As The Quaintest And Most Incomprehensible Thing About Us.

I Don't Think About The Real Future Very Much.

The Designers [of The 1930s] Were Populists, You See; They Were Trying To Give The Public What It Wanted. What The Public Wanted Was The Future.

Home. Home Was Bama, The Sprawl, The Boston-atlanta Metropolitan Axis. Program A Map To Display Frequency Of Data Exchange, Every Thousand Megabytes A Single Pixel On A Very Large Screen. Manhattan And Atlanta Burn Solid White. Then They Start To Pulse, The Rate Of Traffic Threatening To Overload Your Simulation. Your Map Is About To Go Nova. Cool It Down. Up Your Scale. Each Pixel A Million Megabytes. At A Hundred Million Megabytes Per Second, You Begin To Make Out Certain Blocks In Midtown Manhattan, Outlines Of Hundred-year-old Industrial Parks Ringing The Old Core Of Atlanta.

It Seems As Though Everyone Is Going To The Currency Of Celebrity. Everyone's Getting Their Own Account Of Whatever That Currency Is. That's Something Neat.

A Nation,” He Heard Himself Say, “consists Of Its Laws. A Nation Does Not Consist Of Its Situation At A Given Time. If An Individual’s Morals Are Situational, That Individual Is Without Morals. If A Nation’s Laws Are Situational, That Nation Has No Laws, And Soon Isn’t A Nation.

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Theodore Roosevelt

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