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.

When you want to know how things really work, study them when they’re coming apart.

We see in order to move; we move in order to see.

No,” said Blackwell, “she won’t, because that would be a violation of the very personal terms I will have established in our conversation. That’s the key word here, Laney, ‘personal.’ ‘Up close, and.’ We will...

Change is happening and old structures are falling in the form of a “Death of a Thousand Cuts.” In other words one grand act is not occuring but a multitude of small expressions on the...

Paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer.But he was also fond of saying, at other times, that even paranoid schizophrenics have enemies.

Time moves in one direction, memory another. We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.

At another time she asked,’what is a soul?” No one knows,’I replied; ‘but we know it is not the body, and it is that part of us which thinks and loves and hopes’…[and] is invisible…’But...

She hung up before he could say goodbye. Stood there with her arm cocked, phone at ear-level, suddenly aware of the iconic nature of her unconscious pose. Some very considerable part of the gestural language...

And the Flatline aligned the nose of Kuang’s sting with the center of the dark below. And dove. Case’s sensory input warped with their velocity. His mouth filled with an aching taste of blue. His...

Case had always taken it for granted that the real bosses, the kingpins in a given industry, would be both more and less than people… He’d seen it in the men who’d crippled him in...

Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.

When we do the best we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another.

Things aren’t different. Things are things.

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...

And waking, once again, face smudged into Andrea’s couch, the red quilt humped around her shoulders, smelling coffee, while Andrea hummed some Tokyo pop song to herself in the next room, dressing, in a gray...

There are tumults of the mind, when, like the great convulsions of Nature, all seems anarchy and returning chaos; yet often, in those moments of vast disturbance, as in the strife of Nature itself, some...

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.

Hitler had had entirely too brilliant a graphics department, and had understood the power of branding all too well.

It was the root of street cool, too, the knowing posture that implied connection, invisible lines up to the hidden levels of influence.

They’d run all these tests on him and decided he wasn’t racist. He wasn’t, either, but not because he thought about it particularly. He just couldn’t see the point. It just made for a lot...

One of the liberating effects of science fiction when I was a teenager was precisely its ability to tune me into all sorts of strange data and make me realize that I wasn’t as totally...

Farber says (in my recollection, anyway) the European (or classical) art, including film, is culturally assumed to be a monumental slab. It’s about that slab, and how it’s been shaped, or what’s been carved on...

Our best analyst thinks it’s not a tactical design. Something for mall ninjas….Young men who dress to feel they’ll be mistaken for having special capability. A species of cosplay, really. Endemic. Lots of boys are...

She is increasingly of the opinion that worrying about problems doesn’t help solve them, but she hasn’t really found an alternative yet. Surely you can’t just leave them there.

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...

Voodou isn’t like that. It isn’t concerned with notions of salvation and transcendence. What it’s about is getting things done. You follow me? In out system, there are many gods, spirits. Part of one big...

Rain woke him, a slow drizzle, his feet tangled in coils of discarded fiberoptics. The arcade’s sea of sound washed over him, receded, returned. Rolling over, he sat up and held his head.

No other reason.

Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky.

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.

you can`t recycle wasted time

She’d first seen Covent Garden after a heavy snow, walking with her hand in Win’s, and she remembers the secret silence of London then, the amazing hush of it, slush crunching beneath her feet and...

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.

It is a way now, approximately, of being at home. The forum has become one of the most consistent places of her life, like a familiar cafe that exists someone outside geography and beyond time...

A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he’d taken and the corners he cut in Night City, and he’d still see the...

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...

I personally recall that world, which you can only imagine was preferable to this one,’ she said. ‘Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp....

The future is there… looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system....

People who couldn’t imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn’t need to imagine, because they already were. She’d said it was always a mistake, to believe...

That’s something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: The most interesting applications turn up on a battlefield, or in a gallery.

History had its fascinations, but could be burdensome.

The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.The Economist, December 4, 2003

The ‘Net is a waste of time, and that’s exactly what’s right about it.

Mary Shelley may well have invented science fiction. I think she did! But after that it seemed to be a boys’ game.

His smile was the nightmare in my back pocket.(Speaking about Ronald Reagan)

In Heathrow a vast chunk of memory detached itself from a blank bowl of airport sky and fell on him. He vomited into a blue plastic canister without breaking stride.

We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought...

She’s right, Kate’s right, I’m right and you’re wrong. If you drive her away from here it will be over my dead— chair, has it never occurred to you at on one occasion you might...