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!

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?

The future's here already. It's just unevenly distributed.

It's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information.

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.

Part of the core of my system, is a way of trying to give the characters more control. If I'm practicing making up what the characters will do, it's never good. In fact, when I catch myself doing that, I try to get rid of that section, and try and let them start making the decisions.

A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my own career want list. That label enabled mainstream science fiction to safely assimilate our dissident influence, such as it was. Cyberpunk could then be embraced and given prizes and patted on the head, and genre science fiction could continue unchanged.