Philip K. Dick Quotes

“A man is an angel that has gone deranged.”

“Certainly it constitutes bad news when the people who agree with you are buggier than batsh*t.”

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

“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 guess that's the story of life: what you most fear never happens, but what you most yearn for never happens either.

This is the difference between life and fiction. I suppose it's a good trade-off. But I'm not sure.”

“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…

This is why I love SF. I love to read it; I love to write it. The SF writer sees not just possibilities but wild possibilities. It's not just 'What if' – it's 'My God; what if' – in frenzy and hysteria. The Martians are always coming.”

“If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others.”

“It really seems to me that in the midst of great tragedy, there is always the horrible possibility that something terribly funny will happen.”

“Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans... If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities?

And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him.

The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication... and there is the real illness.”

“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 them.”

“The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things which never change and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything changes.

If you superimpose their two views, you get this result: Nothing is real.”

“The problem with introspection is that it has no end.”

“The true measure of a man is not his intelligence or how high he rises in this freak establishment. No, the true measure of a man is this: how quickly can he respond to the needs of others and how much of himself he can give.”

“There will come a time when it isn't 'They're spying on me through my phone' anymore. Eventually, it will be 'My phone is spying on me'.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Everything in life is just for a while.”

“If I had known it was harmless I would have killed it myself.”

“Imagine being sentient but not alive. Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognizing but not being alive. A person can die and still go on. Sometimes what looks out at you from a person's eyes maybe died back in childhood.”

“Sometimes I wish I knew how to go crazy. I forget how.”

“Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.”

“They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed – run over, maimed, destroyed – but they continued to play anyhow.”

“What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me – into us – clearly or darkly?

I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can't any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone's sake, the scanners do better.

Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we'll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.”

“We all lie to ourselves; we tell our own selves more lies than we ever do other people.”

“Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet.

Because, ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated.”

“I like her; I could watch her the rest of my life. She has breasts that smile.”

“I never felt like that before. Maybe it could be depression, like you get. I can understand how you suffer now when you're depressed; I always thought you liked it and I thought you could have snapped yourself out any time, if not alone then by means of the mood organ.

But when you get that depressed you don't care. Apathy, because you've lost a sense of worth. It doesn't matter whether you feel better because you have no worth.”

“It's the basic condition of life to be required to violate our own identity.”

“Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there's twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.

There's the First Law of Kipple: 'Kipple drives out nonkipple.' Like Gresham's law about bad money. And in these apartments there's been nobody here to fight the kipple.

No one can win against kipple except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I've sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being.

But eventually I'll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It's a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.”

“Maybe I'll go where I can see stars, he said to himself as the car gained velocity and altitude; it headed away from San Francisco, toward the uninhabited desolation to the north. To the place where no living thing would go. Not unless it felt that the end had come.”