Philip K. Dick Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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.

You know how people are about not taking care of an animal;

they consider it immoral and antiempathic. I mean, technically it's not a crime like it was right after WWT but the feeling's still there.

I am a reader. I am a writer. People assume I do these things to escape. You couldn't be more right. I'm escaping a world I don't like. A world I have no control in. In this world, I am nothing. I am a color, a height, a weight, a number. But in the world of books and writing, I am amazing. I am powerful. I am different. People are better. Worlds are endless. Change is possible. Life is manageable.

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.

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?

People have told me that everything about me, every facet of my life, psyche, experiences, dreams, and fears, are laid out explicitly in my writing, that from the corpus of my work I can be absolutely and precisely inferred. This is true.

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.

And of course, in my writing, there is the constant theme of music, love of, preoccupation with, music. Music is the single thread making my life into a coherency.

Each of us assumes everyone else knows what he is doing.

They all assume we know what we are doing. We don't.

(Insanity) is not hubris, not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate - confusion between him who worships and that which is worshipped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.

The silence of the world could not rein back it's greed.

Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won.

One thing I've found that I can do that I really enjoy is rereading my own writing, earlier stories and novels especially. It induces mental time travel, the same way certain songs you hear on the radio do ... the whole thing returns, an eerie feeling that I'm sure you've experienced.

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 in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is "Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying," but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory.

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.

To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement.

... Whoever defeats the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus.

Madness has its own dynamism. It just goes on.

Death hides within every religion. And at any time it can flash forth-not with healing in its wings but with poison, with that which wounds.

Writing is a lonely way of life. You shut yourself up in your study and work and work.

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.

Whom the gods notice they destroy.

God can be good and terrible-not in succession-but at the same time.

This is why we seek a mediator between us and him; we approach him through the mediating priest and attenuate and enclose him through the sacraments. It is for our own safety: to trap him within confines which render him safe.

No matter how long a log stays in the water, it doesn't become a crocodile.

My life and creative work are justified and completed by Blade Runner.

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!

We are in a maze which we built, and then we fell into, now can't get out.

To make the game into something real, something more than merely an intellectual exercise, we elected to lose our exceptional faculties, to reduce us an entire level. This unfortunately, includes a loss of memory.

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

The Logos was both that which thought, and the thing which it thought: thinker and thought together. The universe, then, is thinker and thought, and since we are part of it, we as humans are, in the final analysis, thoughts of and thinkers of those thoughts.

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

When two people dream the same dream, it ceases to be an illusion.

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.