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.
Upon arriving in the capital-F Future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower-case now.
That’s something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: The most interesting applications turn up on a battlefield, or in a gallery.
The past is past, the future unformed. There is only the moment, and that is where he prefers to be.
Enlightenment is “being,” and it grows; it’s end is serenity.
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.
Three in the morning. Making yourself a cup of coffee in the dark, using a flashlight when you pour the boiling water.
It was hot, the night we burned Chrome.
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination.
Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description.
Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places that had once belonged to cigarettes now belonged to phones.
Things aren’t different. Things are things.
You must learn to overcome your very natural and appropriate revulsion for your own work.
Somewhere, deep within her, surfaces a tiny clockwork submarine. There are times when you can only take the next step. And then another.
Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television.
Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky.
Fiction is an illusion wrought with many small, conventionally symbolic marks, triggering visions in the minds of others.
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.
We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.
His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol.