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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.
-William Gibson
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The Most Common Human

William Gibson
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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.

Understanding the Quote: "the most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying...."

This quote by William Gibson reflects deeply on the theme of lying. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Lying, Writing, Vanity, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how William Gibson interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About William Gibson

William Gibson is celebrated for insightful thoughts on lying and writing. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

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Topic
Lying
Writing
Vanity
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Gadgets Are Usually The Last Thing I Think About, And If There's Something New, I'll Get To The Store For The Final Shipment Of The First Generation When It's On Sale. So I Have Last Year's Stuff.
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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.
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You Must Learn To Overcome Your Very Natural And Appropriate Revulsion For Your Own Work.
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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.
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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.
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Dreaming In Public Is An Important Part Of Our Job Description.
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Television Has - Particularly At The Hbo Level In The United States - Become A Completely New Genre. Something Like Deadwood Or The Wire Is A Whole New Thing - There Was No Equivalent To That Medium Before. It's Like A New Way Of Telling Stories.
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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.
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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.
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When You Want To Know How Things Really Work, Study Them When They're Coming Apart.
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[the Currency Of Being Celebrity] Used To Be Only The Elect Had Any Manna In The Information Society And Everyone Else Was A Consumer.
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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.
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You Know What Your Trouble Is? You're The Kind Who Always Reads The Handbook. Anything People Build, Any Kind Of Technology, It's Going To Have Some Specific Purpose. It's For Doing Something That Somebody Already Understands. But If It's New Technology, It'll Open Areas Nobody's Ever Thought Of Before. You Read The Manual, Man, And You Won't Play Around With It, Not The Same Way. And You Get All Funny When Somebody Else Uses It To Do Something You Never Thought Of.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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And, For An Instant, She Stared Directly Into Those Soft Blue Eyes And Knew, With An Instinctive Mammalian Certainty, That The Exceedingly Rich Were No Longer Even Remotely Human.
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I Can't Do Fiction Unless I Visualize What's Going On. When I Began To Write Science Fiction, One Of The Things I Found Lacking In It Was Visual Specificity. It Seemed There Was A Lot Of Lazy Imagining, A Lot Of Shorthand.
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I Look At [toronto] And Think Well, Perhaps My Grandchildren Will Someday Look At This Stuff With The Sort Of Appreciation I Once Held For Art Deco. Although I've Come To Find Art Deco Quite Creepy Too.
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All I Knew About The Word Cyberspace When I Coined It, Was That It Seemed Like An Effective Buzzword. It Seemed Evocative And Essentially Meaningless. It Was Suggestive Of Something, But Had No Real Semantic Meaning, Even For Me, As I Saw It Emerge On The Page.
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Eight
Years
Two
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Bears
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Different
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Summer
Baby
Beach
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Thinking
People
Cyberspace Is Where You Are When You're On The Telephone.
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Telephones
Where You Are
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Imaginary
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May
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Time Is Money
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Toronto
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Thinking
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Traditional
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Age
Doe
Mortality
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Feel Good
Want
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Quests
Tiny
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Bullshit
Internet
Free Speech
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Culture
Violence
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Moving
Order
Movement
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Done
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Thinking
People
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Poverty
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Legos
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The Box Was A Universe, A Poem, Frozen On The Boundaries Of Human Experience.
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Boundaries
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Teenager
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War
Technology
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Thinking
Written
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Thinking
Cities
Waiting
Secrets...are The Very Root Of Cool.
Roots
Secret
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.
Knowing
Long
Tree
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Good Friend
People
Progress
I Was Once Really Close To Sitting Down And Having A Conversation With A Shadowy Young Woman Who Is Reputed Have Become A Millionaire By Investing In Beanie Babies. She Was Someone That A Couple People Claimed To Know, She Seemed To Exist, But She Remained Shadowy.
Baby
Couple
People
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?
Inspirational
Motivational
Education
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.
Real
Thinking
Internet
I Buried Everything Under Layers And Layers And Layers Of Code, But The Signifiers Of My Emotionality Were There, For Me.
Layers
Buried
Code
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.
Reading
Europe
Space
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.
Moving
Kansas
Guy
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.
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Guy
Lazy
Cyberspace. A Consensual Hallucination Experienced Daily By Billions Of Legitimate Operators, In Every Nation, By Children Being Taught Mathematical Concepts.
Children
Technology
Cyberspace
If I Meet Someone And Discover That They're An Absolute, Very Earnest Nationalist, It's Unlikely That I'm Going To Get Much Closer To Them. I Don't Understand Them. It Doesn't Matter Where They're From, I Just Don't Get It. I'm A Multi-national Kind Of Guy.
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Matter
Kind
When I Was First Writing About Japan, It Was At The Peak Of The Bubble. Bubble Popped, But They Kept On Going. Japanese Street Style Feeds American Iconics Back Into America In Somewhat The Way English Rock Once Fed American Blues Back Into America.
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America
Rocks
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.
Men
Ideas
Interesting
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.
Real
Thinking
Grandchildren
Movies Have Gotten Dull, The Way Network Television Got Dull. And Television, If We Can Still Even Call It That, Is Still Really Exciting And Riveting And People Are Totally Into It. I Am Always Meeting People Who Have These Favorite Shows That They Are Completely Wired Too And Not Only Have I Never Seen It But I Don't Even Know How To Find It.
People
Exciting
Meetings
I Can See Television Much More Easily Than I Can See Features, Because The Economy And Politics Of Making Big, Big Features Seems To Me To Be Narrowing Even From What It Was.
Television
Economy
Bigs
To Some Extent I'm Guilty Of Wishful Thinking. The Absence Of The Interstitial I Find Unbearable.
Thinking
Unbearable
Guilty
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.
Growing Up
Gun
Law
Cyberspace. A Consensual Hallucination.
Cyberspace
Hallucinations
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.
Writing
Ice Cream
Melting
The Most Common Human Act That Writing A Novel Resembles Is Lying. The Working Novelist Lies Daily, Very Complexly, And At Great Length.
Lying
Writing
Vanity
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.
Kids
Opportunity
Class
I Think With One Exception I've Never Changed An Opening Sentence After A Book Was Completed.
Book
Thinking
Changed
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.
Giving
Trying
Architecture
People Who Feel Safer With A Gun Than With Guaranteed Medical Insurance Don't Yet Have A Fully Adult Concept Of Scary.
Gun
People
Scary
I've Always Been Interested In People Who Aren't From Anywhere In Particular. I Think It's All Melting. This Has Been True For As Long As I Can Remember In My Adult Life.
Thinking
Long
People
I Don't Have To Write About The Future. For Most People, The Present Is Enough Like The Future To Be Pretty Scary.
Writing
People
Scary
I Don't Always Like Writing, But I Very Much Like Having Written.
Writing
Written
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.
Evil
Southern
Age
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.
Light
Data
Cities
The Future Is Here - It Just Has Not Been Uniformly Distributed.
The Experience Of Celebrity Is Gradually Being Democratized.
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.
Soul
Events
Horizon
Time Moves In One Direction, Memory In Another.
Time
Memories
Moving
The Ecological Impact Of Book Manufacture And Traditional Book Marketing - I Think That Should Really Be Considered. We Have This Industry In Which We Cut Down Trees To Make The Paper That We Then Use Enormous Amounts Of Electricity To Turn Into Books That Weigh A Great Deal And Are Then Shipped Enormous Distances To Point-of-sale Retail.
Distance
Book
Cutting
She Walked On, Comforted By The Surf, By The One Perpetual Moment Of Beach-time, The Now-and-always Of It.
Beach
Surf
Moments
The Street Has Its Own Use For Things.
Use
Streets
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.
Unique
Thinking
Trying
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.
Country
Japan
Years
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.
Strong
America
Lists
I Wanted To Make Room For Antiheroes.
Rooms
Antiheroes
Wanted
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.
Thinking
People
Important
What Strikes Me About Toronto Is That Toronto's Great Misfortune Was To Have Too Much Money In The Late 70s And Early 80s, And Consequently, It Built In The Style Of Those Periods, Which Is Hideous.
Style
Toronto
Too Much
I've Become Convinced That Nostalgia Is A Fundamentally Unhealthy Modality. When You See It, It's Usually Attached To Something Else That's Really, Seriously Bad. I Don't Traffic In Nostalgia. We're Becoming A Global Culture.
Culture
Becoming
Nostalgia
I Can't Imagine Writing A Book Without Some Strong Female Characters, Unless That Was A Demand Of The Setting.
Strong
Book
Writing
'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.
Thinking
People
Way
We're Living In A Future That's Weirder Than Anybody Except Possibly.
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.
Running
Art
Shoes
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.
Airports
People
Citizens
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. That Fascinates Me, Because It Seems To Be Symbolic Of Something Going On In The Culture Itself, And I Also Have A Sort Of Innate Admiration For The Stubbornness It Requires To Actually Make Those Things Physically. It's Become Incredibly Difficult. In North America, We've Largely Forgotten How To Do It.
America
Interesting
People
Tim Powers Is A Brilliant Writer.
Brilliant
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.
Writing
Order
Down And
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.
Media
Gestalt
May
I'm Not The Only One: Witness Pokemon! They Still Keep Coming Up With This Stuff That Just Rivets Us In Unexpected Areas.
Pokemon
Stuff
Unexpected
I Feel Like I've Been Very Fortunate In That I've Stuck Like A Burr To The Dog-leg Of The Next Generation Of Nerdism. I've Been Carried Into The Xxith Century On Bill Gates' Pants-cuff.
Dog
Generations
Cuffs
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.
Writing
Years
Southern
The Street Finds Its Own Uses For Things.
Use
Streets
Cyberpunk
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.
Thinking
Imagine
Science Fiction
The Future Is There," Cayce Hears Herself Say, "looking Back At Us. Trying To Make Sense Of The Fiction We Will Have Become. And From Where They Are, The Past Behind Us Will Look Nothing At All Like The Past We Imagine Behind Us Now.
Past
Trying
Looks
For Years I Have Been Mourning And Not For My Dead, It Is For This Boy For Whatever Corner In My Heart Died When His Childhood Slid Out Of My Arms.
Heart
Boys
Years
I Think That One Of The Visions That Is Closest To Reality Is The Cardboard City In The Subway Station In Tokyo, Which Is Based Very Closely On A Series Of Documentary Photographs Of People Living Like That And Of The Contents Of The Boxes. Those Are Quite Haunting Because Tokyo Homeless People Reiterate The Whole Nature Of Living In Tokyo In These Cardboard Boxes, They're Only Slightly Smaller Than Tokyo Apartments, And They Have Almost As Many Consumer Goods. It's A Nightmare Of Boxes Within Boxes.
Reality
Thinking
Cities
I'm Very Primitive In Terms Of Economics. The Kind Of New Business In Which Stock Gets More Valuable Because The Company Grows, But There Must Be Limits To Growth. But If Publishing Is Expanding To Fill That Retail Space, It Seems Like There May Be A Necessary And Unpleasant Correction Waiting Down The Road. How Many Books To People Want?
Book
Space
People
When I Come To A New City Is I Combine: I Say, Well, It's Like Barcelona And Edinburgh, Though I Can't Imagine What That Would Be. But Toronto, The Last Few Times I've Been Here, What Always Comes Up Is Chicago And West Berlin. It's A Big, Sprawling City Beside A Lake, Of A Certain Age And A Certain Architectural Complexity. But The High-end Retail Core Looks More Like West Germany Than The Magnificent Mile. Yonge Street Is Like K-damm. There's An Excess Of Surface Marble And Bronze: It's Germanic And As Pretentious As Pretentious Can Be.
Lakes
West Germany
Cities
Some Very Considerable Part Of The Gestural Language Of Public Places That Had Once Belonged To Cigarettes Now Belonged To Phones.
Phones
Language
Cigarette
It Was Hot, The Night We Burned Chrome.
Night
Hot
Chrome
Our Hardware Is Likely To Turn Into Something Like Us A Lot Faster Than We Are Likely To Turn Into Something Like Our Hardware...i Very Much Doubt That Our Grandchildren Will Understand The Distinction Between That Which Is A Computer And That Which Isn't.
Grandchildren
Doubt
Computer
I Started Writing Short Fiction Very Briefly, As I Imagine Is The Case For Some Novelists.
Writing
Novelists
Fiction
Art Deco For Me Except In Its Most Crazed And Attenuated Forms, It's Jut A Matter Of Taste.
Art
Matter
Taste
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.
Currency
Neat
Accounts
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.
Fun
Intelligent
Addiction
"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.
Military
Mean
Long
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.
Voice
Tongue
Babel
It Had Also Been My Belief Since I Started Writing Fiction That Science Fiction Is Never Really About The Future. When Science Fiction Is Old, You Can Only Read It As Being Pretty Much About The Moment In Which It Was Written. But It Seemed To Me That The Toolkit That Science Fiction Had Given Me When I Started Working Had Become The Toolkit Of A Kind Of Literary Naturalism That Could Be Applied To An Inherently Incredible Present.
Writing
Belief
Kind
I'm A Reluctant Writer Of Non-fiction, In Part Because I Don't Really Feel Qualified.
Fiction
Feels
Qualified
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.
America
People
Would Be
Hollis Thought He Looked Like William Burroughs, Minus The Bohemian Substrate (or Perhaps The Methadone). Like Someone Who'd Be Invited Quail Shooting With The Vice-president, Though Too Careful To Get Himself Shot.
President
Vices
Shooting
The 'net Is A Waste Of Time.
Technology
Waste
Wasting Time
I Took Punk To Be The Detonation Of Some Slow-fused Projectile Buried Deep In Society's Flank A Decade Earlier, And I Took It To Be, Somehow, A Sign.
Punk
Buried
Projectile
Five Hours' New York Jet Lag And Cayce Pollard Wakes In Camden Town To The Dire And Ever-circling Wolves Of Disrupted Circadian Rhythm.
New York
Lag
Towns
He Took A Duck In The Face At 250 Knots.
Ducks
Faces
Knots
"cyberspace Is Everting." It's Interpenetrating Our Everyday Reality To The Point That On-line Is Our Normal Waking State.
Reality
Entrepreneur
Everyday
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'.
Brother
Book
Reality
I Don't Think About The Real Future Very Much.
Real
Thinking
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.
Real
Writing
World
The Past Is Past, The Future Unformed. There Is Only The Moment, And That Is Where He Prefers To Be.
Time
Past
Moments
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.
People
Design
Pay
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."
Answers
Honest
Knows
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