Philip K. Dick Quotes

It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

Reality is whatever refuses to go away when I stop believing in it.

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words.

I you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.

Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error of judgment.

I mean, after all; you have to consider we're only made out of dust. That's admittedly not much to go on and we shouldn't forget that. But even considering, I mean it's a sort of bad beginning, we're not doing too bad. So I personally have faith that even in this lousy situation we're faced with we can make it. You get me?

And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world?

Barefoot conducts his seminars on his houseboat in Sausalito.

It costs a hundred dollars to find out why we are on this Earth. You also get a sandwich, but I wasn't hungry that day. John Lennon had just been killed and I think I know why we are on this Earth; it's to find out that what you love the most will be taken away from you, probably due to an error in high places rather than by design.

Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words.

If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.

I was twelve when I read my first sf magazine

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything.

We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.

The will to believe chases out the rational mind, whenever and wherever the two come into conflict.

A man is an angel that has gone deranged.

If I'd known it was harmless, I'd have killed it myself!

Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.

I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. Okay, so I should revise my standards; I'm out of step. I should yield to reality. I have never yielded to reality. That's what SF is all about. If you wish to yield to reality, go read Philip Roth; read the New York literary establishment mainstream bestselling writers

You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go.

It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.

This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people;

they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance.

The trouble with being educated is that it takes a long time;

it uses up the better part of your life and when you are finished what you know is that you would have benefited more by going into banking.