William Gibson is an American-Canadian writer, essayist, speculative fiction author, and novelist credited for pioneering the era of science fiction known as “cyberpunk.”

Born on March 17, 1948, Gibson lost both of his parents by the time he was 18 years old and dropped out of school before graduating. He isolated himself and spent a lot of time homeless and jobless, wanting nothing more than to become a science-fiction writer.

The author decided to get back on track with studying, enrolled at the University of British Columbia and finally began his writing career in the late 70s. After taking a short course on science fiction, Gibson wrote his first short story, called Fragments of the Hologram Rose.

Also known as the Noir Prophet of the Cyberpunk subgenre, Gibson used the concept for the first time in his short story, Burning Chrome (1982) and later in his debut novel Neuromancer (1984), which won three major science-fiction awards.

Most of Gibson’s work revolves around near-future stories, noir, depictions of late capitalism, the internet and social strata.

Here are 20 mind-blowing William Gibson quotes on what the future holds

The future has already arrived. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.

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

I think that technologies are morally neutral until we apply them. It’s only when we use them for good or for evil that they become good or evil.

When the past is always with you, it may as well be present; and if it is present, it will be future as well.

People who feel safer with a gun than with guaranteed medical insurance don’t yet have a fully adult concept of scary.

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

A book exists at the intersection of the author’s subconscious and the reader’s response.

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

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

You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation.

Stand high long enough and your lightning will come.

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

I think I’d probably tell you that it’s easier to desire and pursue the attention of tens of millions of total strangers than it is to accept the love and loyalty of the people closest to us.

If ignorance were enough to make things not exist, the world would be more like a lot of people think it is. But it’s not.

Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places that had once belonged to cigarettes now belonged to phones.

We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self.

A middleman’s business is to make himself a necessary evil.

You’ll learn. Some things you teach yourself to remember to forget.

Stability is the beginning of the end. We only walk by continually beginning to fall forward.