I saw William Gibson (WG) being interviewed by Doug Coupland (DC) back in 2012. The audio of the interview is here. I pulled out my favourite quotes:

DC: We are surrounded by the voices of dead people, such as Elvis. We take it for granted that we can hear the voices of the dead.

DC: All sentient beings imagine themselves as the centre of the universe. DC: I grew up with the notion that my life is a story - This is a 20th C. outdated conceit. Now a kid grows up with the notion that his life is a spreadsheet.

WG: Life is one damn thing after another. It's not good to see life as a story.

DC: Doug's Law: You can have either information or a life, but not both.

DC: People today can't distinguish between lived life and virtual life. The speed and memory of being on line are irreversibly addictive.

WG: It's not really the speed and memory that are addictive. We are addicted to the transparency of experience. We want to be there in a "real" experience. We want reality on demand. Speed and memory are a natural desire.

Ed note (Lil) - my understanding of transparency addictiveness is that we want more thoroughly involved versions of now. -- at least that's what we believe we're getting by being connected all the time.

DC: "Imagined literary futures melt like ice cream in the trunk of your car." [literary futures such as 1984]

WG: If I knew what those in the future think of us, I'd know everything I need to know about them.

DC: 97 is the new 100 IQ. Does your brain feel different now than it did in 1992?

WG: With connection to the global instantaneous memory prosthetic (Google), the world is a bit less mysterious. Ignorance was a brilliant screen on which the imagination could project.

WG: If all the networks converge, it would be a singularity.

DC: Geek Rapture.

WG: We're already the borg.

DC: The Catholic Church tried to suppress the fork because it resembled the devil's pitchfork. [DC talked about his rapture project. He is groupsourcing a mortuarial community.]

DC: How is your life stranger than 20 years ago?

WC: I have good friends that I've never laid eyes on. It's a post-geographical world, an instantaneous penpal machine.

DC: Is the future friendly? Should we look forward to the future?

WC: We might as well.