Philip K. Dick Quotes

239 Sourced Quotes

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

Philip K. Dick
It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.

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

Philip K. Dick
The pain, the cut in his scalp, so unexpected and undeserved, had for some reason cleared away the cobwebs. It flashed on him instantly that he didn't hate the kitchen cabinet: he hated his wife, his two daughters, his whole house, the back yard with its power mower, the garage, the radiant heating system, the front yard, the fence, the whole fucking place and everyone in it.

Philip K. Dick
The cries of the dead are terrible indeed; you should try not to hear them.

Philip K. Dick
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.

Philip K. Dick
No one today remembered why the war had come about or who, if anyone, had won. The dust which had contaminated most of the planet's surface had originated in no country, and no one, even the wartime enemy, had planned on it.

Philip K. Dick
Dilemma of a civilized man; body mobilized but danger obscure.

Philip K. Dick
We hypostasize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of the information; the message has changed. This is a language which we have lost the ability to read. We ourselves are a part of this language; changes in us are changes in the content of the information. We ourselves are information-rich; information enters us, is processed and is then projected outwards once more, now in an altered form. We are not aware that we are doing this, that in fact this is all we are doing.

Philip K. Dick
Are you an official of some kind? Like a greeter? Or from the L. A. Chamber of Commerce? I've had dealings with them and they're all right.
No, Buckman said. I'm an individual. Like you.

Philip K. Dick
She makes life over, he realized. She controls life, whereas I just sit on my can and let it happen to me.

Philip K. Dick
Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane.

Philip K. Dick
Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find.

Philip K. Dick
Whom the gods notice they destroy. Be small... and you will escape the jealousy of the great.

Philip K. Dick
But an artist, he realized. Or rather so-called artist. Bohemian. That's closer to it. The artistic life without the talent.

Philip K. Dick
People like your wife are dangerous.
Why? Hamilton asked.
They don't belong to any group. They fool around with everything. As soon as we turn our back—
So you destroy them. You turn them over to the lunatic patriots.
The lunatic patriots, McFeyffe said, we can understand. But not your wife. She signs Party peace petitions and she reads the Chicago Tribune. People like her—they're more of a menace to Party discipline than any other bunch. The cult of individualism. The idealist with his own law, his own ethics. Refusing to accept authority. It undermines society. It topples the whole structure. Nothing lasting can be built on it. People like your wife just won't take orders.

Philip K. Dick
Forty-two. His age had astounded him for years, and each time that he had sat so astounded, trying to figure out what had become of the young, slim man in his twenties, a whole additional year slipped by and had to be recorded, a continually growing sum which he could not reconcile with his self-image. He still saw himself, in his mind's eye, as youthful, and when he caught sight of himself in photographs he usually collapsed... Somebody took my actual physical presence away and substituted this, he had thought from time to time. Oh well, so it went.

Philip K. Dick
[Fiction] Appeals to the base lusts that hide in everyone no matter how respectable on the surface.

Philip K. Dick
Cris didn't play fair. He had watched half an hour — then come out and thrown once. One perfect toss, one dead ringer.

Philip K. Dick
He was always moving, advancing into new regions he had never seen before. A constantly unfolding panorama of sights and scenes, frozen landscapes spread out ahead. All objects were fixed. Pieces on a vast chess board through which he moved, arms folded, face calm. A detached observer who saw objects that lay ahead of him as clearly as those under foot.
Right now, as he crouched in the small supply closet, he saw an unusually varied multitude of scenes for the next half hour. Much lay ahead. The half hour was divided into an incredibly complex pattern of separate configurations. He had reached a critical region; he was about to move through worlds of intricate complexity.

Philip K. Dick
Somebody high up was toying with the idea of allowing them to breed. Some sort of industrial use. We withheld euth for years. But Cris Johnson stayed alive outside our control. Those things at Denver were under constant scrutiny.

Philip K. Dick
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 science fiction is all about.

Philip K. Dick
[Hawthorne Abendsen] told us about our own world. This, what's around us now. He wants us to see it for what it is. And I do, and more so each moment.

Philip K. Dick
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.

Philip K. Dick
Fear, Jason said, can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy. If you're afraid you don't commit yourself to life completely; fear makes you always, always hold something back. '

Philip K. Dick
She could kill him easily. But the lash-tube wavered. Cris Johnson stood without fear; he wasn't at all afraid. Why not? Didn't he understand what it was? What the small metal tube could do to him?
"Of course," she said suddenly, in a choked whisper. "You can see ahead. You know I'm not going to kill you. Or you wouldn't have come here."

Philip K. Dick
Here I am saying that mutants are dangerous to us ordinaries, a view which John W. Campbell, Jr. deplored. We were supposed to view them as our leaders. But I always felt uneasy as to how they would view us. I mean, maybe they wouldn't want to lead us. Maybe from their superevolved lofty level we wouldn't seem worth leading. Anyhow, even if they agreed to lead us, I felt uneasy as where we would wind up going. It might have something to do with buildings marked SHOWERS but which really weren't.

Philip K. Dick
"No communication." Baines was sweating. "In eighteen years there hasn't been any semantic bridge between you? Does he have any contact? Signs? Codes?"
"He — ignores us. He eats here, stays with us. Sometimes he plays when we play. Or sits with us. He's gone days on end. We've never been able to find out what he's doing — or where. He sleeps in the barn — by himself."

Philip K. Dick
But at least he can still see the lights below us. Although maybe for him it doesn't matter.

Philip K. Dick
The hymns were unfamiliar to him, but he quickly picked up the general beat. The hymns had a redundant simplicity; the same phrases and tones appeared and reappeared. The same monotonous ideas, repeated indefinitely. The appetite of (Tetragrammaton) was insatiable, he concluded. A childish, nebulous personality that required constant praise—and in the most obvious terms. Quick to anger, (Tetragrammaton) was equally quick to sink into euphoria, was eager and ready to lap up these blatant flatteries.
A balance. A method of lulling the Deity. But what a delicate mechanism. Danger for everyone... The easily-aroused Presence that was always nearby. Always listening.

Philip K. Dick