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.”