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.

Don't let the little fuckers generation gap you.

And don't forget to water the fuckin' goldfish.

You are exhibiting symptoms of urban singles angst. There are cures for this. Drink up. Go.

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

Maelcum a rude boy," said the other, "an' a righteous tug pilot.

The faces he woke up with in the worlds hotels were like God's own hood ornaments. Women's sleeping faces, identical and alone, naked, aimed straight out to the void.

If you knew enough Greek, she thought, you could assemble a word that meant divination via the pattern of grease left on a paper plate by broasted potatoes. But it would be a long word.

I'm away for a while. But there's no cash on the premises, no drugs, and the pitbull's tested positive. Twice.

Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.

Be quiet, darling. Let pattern recognition have its way.

Zona spat a stream of Spanish that overwhelmed translation, a long and liquid curse.

His nostrils were permanently flared, as though he sniffed invisible winds of art and commerce.

INTO HER DARKNESS, a churning synaesthesia, where her pain was the taste of old iron, scent of melon, wings of a moth brushing her cheek. She was unconscious, and he was barred from her dreams.

Laney felt the pills he'd taken, the ones that were supposed to cushion the jet lag, drop out from under him like some kind of rotten pharmacological scaffolding.

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

Zion smelled of cooked vegetables, humanity, and ganja.

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

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.

Otherwise, he'd have found the ruin empty, and then, somehow, very quietly and almost naturally, he would have died.

Even the delusionally paranoid have enemies.

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

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

Fables from before the Anaheiming.

And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.

Was it Laurie Anderson who said that VR would never look real until they learned how to put some dirt in it?

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 be consummately wrong?

Honey,” Jammer said, “you’ll learn. Some things you teach yourself to remember to forget.

Conspiracy theory's got to be simple. Sense doesn't come into it. People are more scared of how complicated shit actually is than they ever are about whatever's supposed to be behind the conspiracy.

Bevor man bei Sich eine Depression oder geringes Selbstwertgef hl diagnostiziert... sollte man sicher gehen, dass man nicht nur von Arschl chern umgeben ist.

Seated each afternoon in the darkened screening room, Halliday came to recognise the targeted numerals of the Academy leader as sigils preceding the dream state of a film.

...destiny spelled out in a constellation of cheap chrome.

Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway.

Know what's worse than imaginary, Leon?" "What?" "Half-imaginary.

If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science-fiction writers are its court jesters.

A chronic malcontent, albeit quite a purposeless one.

Burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn’t there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself.

The world hadn’t ever had so many moving parts or so few labels.

THEY ATE LUNCH in a Mexican place called Dirty Is God.

All fiction, whether straight or genre, whether literature or Literature, is a personal reinterpretation of its writers’ existence during the time the fiction was written.

I am no spy.” “Then start being your own. If Tokyo’s the frying pan, you may just have landed in the fire.

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

Fuck it. Just fuck it.

Berry,” Pursley said, “you’re in trouble, son. A cop. And an honest one. In trouble. In deep, spectacular, and, please, I have to say this, clearly heroic shit.

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.

When you raise the dead, they bring their baggage.

He robbed a bank in Wichita.

It’s like wearing your cock ring to meet the pope, and making sure he sees it.

I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that comes with time travelling. —H. G. WELLS

A few stray bits of Lego edged fitfully about among lower strata,