Philip K. Dick > Quotes

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”
― Philip K. Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

“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.”
― Philip K. Dick

“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.”
― Philip K. Dick

“My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression.”
― Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

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

“No single thing abides; and all things are fucked up.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

“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.”
― Philip K. Dick

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

“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.”
― Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“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.”
― Philip K. Dick

“Certainly it constitutes bad news when the people who agree with you are buggier than batshit.”
― Philip K. Dick

“Everything in life is just for a while.”
― Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

“A man is an angel that has gone deranged.”
― Philip K. Dick

“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.”
― Philip K. Dick

“I'm not much but I'm all I have.”
― Philip K. Dick

“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.”
― Philip K. Dick

“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.”
― Philip K. Dick

“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 my means of the mood organ. But when you get that depressed you don't care. Apathy, because you've lose a sense of worth. It doesn't matter whether you feel better because you have no worth.”
― Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“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.”
― 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 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.”
― Philip K. Dick

“Reality denied comes back to haunt.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

“I became educated to the fact that the greatest pain does not come zooming down from a distant planet, but from the depths of the heart. Of course, both could happen; your wife and child could leave you, and you could be sitting alone in your empty house with nothing to live for, and in addition the Martians could bore through the roof and get you.”
― Philip K. Dick

“When you are crazy you learn to keep quiet.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive. ”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“If I'd known it was harmless, I'd have killed it myself!”
― Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

“The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than a razor’s edge, sharper than a hound’s tooth, more agile than a mule deer. It is more elusive than the merest phantom. Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it is a phantom. ”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“A weird time in which we are alive. We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

“How undisturbed, the sleep of the foolish.”
― Philip K. Dick, Radio Free Albemuth

“This is a mournful discovery.
1)Those who agree with you are insane
2)Those who do not agree with you are in power.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“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.”
― Philip K. Dick

“I like her; I could watch her the rest of my life. She has breasts that smile.”
― Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not, therefore, go along willingly with it.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

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

“Fish cannot carry guns.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“Grief reunites you with what you've lost. It's a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that's going away. You follow it a far as you can go.

But finally,the grief goes away and you phase back into the world. Without him.

And you can accept that. What the hell choice is there? You cry, you continue to cry, because you don't ever completely come back from where you went with him -- a fragment broken off your pulsing, pumping heart is there still. A cut that never heals.

And if, when it happens to you over and over again in life, too much of your heart does finally go away, then you can't feel grief any more. And then you yourself are ready to die. You'll walk up the inclined ladder and someone else will remain behind grieving for you.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”
― Philip K. Dick

“The problem with introspection is that it has no end.”
― Philip K. Dick

“What they do not comprehend is man's helplessness. I am weak, small, of no consequence to the universe. It does not notice me; I live on unseen. But why is that bad? Isn't it that way? Whom the gods notice they destroy. Be small... and you will escape the jealousy of the great.”
― Philip K. Dick

“Everybody knows that Aristotelian two-value logic is fucked.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne's theorem that 'No man is an island,' but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Dark-Haired Girl

“God is dead,' Nick said. 'They found his carcass in 2019. Floating in space near Alpha.'

'They found the remains of an organism advanced several thousand times over what we are,' Charley said. 'And evidently could create habitable worlds and populate them with living organisms, derived from itself. But that doesn't prove it was God.”
― Philip K. Dick, Our Friends from Frolix 8

“Fear can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy... fear makes you always, always hold something back.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“But the actual touch of her lingered, inside his heart. That remained. In all the years of his life ahead, the long years without her, with never seeing her or hearing from her or knowing anything about her, if she was alive or happy or dead or what, that touch stayed locked within him, sealed in himself, and never went away. That one touch of her hand.”
― Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

“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.”
― Philip K. Dick

“How'd you like to gaze at a beer can throughout eternity? It might not be so bad. There'd be nothing to fear.”
― Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

“There exists, for everyone, a sentence - a series of words - that has the power to destroy you. Another sentence exists, another series of words, that could heal you. If you're lucky you will get the second, but you can be certain of getting the first.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“So books are real to me, too; they link me not just with other minds but with the vision of other minds, what those minds understand and see. I see their worlds as well as I see my own.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

“No structure, even an artificial one, enjoys the process of entropy. It is the ultimate fate of everything, and everything resists it.”
― Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer