William Gibson Writing Quotations

I don't have to write about the future. For most people, the present is enough like the future to be pretty scary.

I've been interested in autism since I've known about it, which is more or less since I've been writing.

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.

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 started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.

I don't begin a novel with a shopping list - the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it.

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.

When I began to write fiction that I knew would be published as science fiction, [and] part of what I brought to it was the critical knowledge that science fiction was always about the period in which it was written.

Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description.

I don't always like writing, but I very much like having written.

You must learn to overcome your very natural and appropriate revulsion for your own work.

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.

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly and at great length. If not for our excessive vanity and our over-active imaginations, novelists might be unusually difficult to deceive.