William Gibson is another one who gets the remix culture.

In an article on Wired, Gibson writes of some of his early influences, including William S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, one of the first authors to use sampling in literature.

Later, attempting to understand this impact, I discovered that Burroughs had incorporated snippets of other writers’ texts into his work, an action I knew my teachers would have called plagiarism. Some of these borrowings had been lifted from American science fiction of the ’40s and ’50s, adding a secondary shock of recognition for me.

By then I knew that this “cut-up method,” as Burroughs called it, was central to whatever it was he thought he was doing, and that he quite literally believed it to be akin to magic. When he wrote about his process, the hairs on my neck stood up, so palpable was the excitement. Experiments with audiotape inspired him in a similar vein: “God’s little toy,” his friend Brion Gysin called their reel-to-reel machine.

It will be interesting to see if Mr. Gibson follows up on what he says he believes here, and introduces any type of Creative Commons licenses on his books or how it affects him going forward.