"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 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

"No single thing abides; and all things are fucked up."
— Philip K. Dick (The Transmigration of Timothy Archer)

"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?)

"If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others."
— Philip K. Dick

"Certainly it constitutes bad news when the people who agree with you are buggier than batshit."
— 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

"Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night."
— Philip K. Dick

"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 I'd known it was harmless, I'd have killed it myself!"
— 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

"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?)

"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)

"Reality is what won't go away when you stop believing in it."
— 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

"Fish cannot carry guns"
— Philip K. Dick (VALIS)

"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

"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?)

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

"How undisturbed, the sleep of the foolish."
— Philip K. Dick (Radio Free Albemuth)

"There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive. "
— Philip K. Dick (VALIS)

"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)

"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."
— Philip K. Dick

"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

"Everybody knows that Aristotelian two-value logic is fucked."
— Philip K. Dick

"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

"I did not tell Fat this, but technically he had become a Buddha. It did not seem to me like a good idea to let him know. After all, if you are a Buddha you should be able to figure it out for yourself."
— Philip K. Dick (VALIS)

"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?)

"Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find."
— Philip K. Dick (The Man in the High Castle)

"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

"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

"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?)

"There was a beauty in the trash of the alleys which I had never noticed before; my vision seemed sharpened, rather than impaired. As I walked along it seemed to me that the flattened beer cans and papers and weeds and junk mail had been arranged by the wind into patterns; these patterns, when I scrutinized them, lay distributed so as to comprise a visual language. "
— Philip K. Dick (Radio Free Albemuth)

"Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane."
— Philip K. Dick

"Odd that the brain could function on its own, without acquainting him with its purposes, its reasons. But the brain was an organ, like the spleen, heart, kidneys. And they went about their private activities. So why not the brain?
"
— Philip K. Dick (The Man Who Japed)

"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

"Well, I hate to admit it, but it is possible that there is (one) such a thing as telepathy and (two) that the CETI project's idea that we might communicate with extraterrestrial beings via telepathy is possibly a reasonable idea--if telepathy exists and if ETIs exist. Otherwise we are trying to communicate with someone who doesn't exist with a system which doesn't work."
— Philip K. Dick (The Dark-Haired Girl)

"Emigrate or Degenerate"
— Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)

"I'd like to see you move up to the goat class, where I think you belong."
— Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)

"Everything in life is just for a while"
— Philip K. Dick (A Scanner Darkly)

"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."
— Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)

""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)

"In a one-party system there is always a landslide."
— Philip K. Dick (Radio Free Albemuth)

"I think Dr. Willis McNelly at the California State University at
Fullerton put it best when he said that the true protagonist of an sf
story or novel is an idea and not a person. If it is *good* sf the
idea is new, it is stimulating, and, probably most important of all,
it sets off a chain-reaction of ramification-ideas in the mind of the
reader; it so-to-speak unlocks the reader’s mind so that the mind,
like the author’s, begins to create. Thus sf is creative and it
inspires creativity, which mainstream fiction by-and-large does not
do. We who read sf (I am speaking as a reader now, not a writer) read
it because we love to experience this chain-reaction of ideas being
set off in our minds by something we read, something with a new idea
in it; hence the very best since fiction ultimately winds up being a
collaboration between author and reader, in which both create–and
enjoy doing it: joy is the essential and final ingredient of science
fiction, the joy of discovery of newness."
— Philip K. Dick (Paycheck and Other Classic Stories By Philip K. Dick)

"Fat realized that one of two possibilities existed and only two; either Dr. Stone was totally insane – not just insane but totally so – or else in an artful, professional fashion he had gotten Fat to talk; he had drawn Fat out and now knew that Fat was totally insane."
— Philip K. Dick (VALIS)

"I mean, knowing people, people are terrified of the unknown and they want to just kill the unknown. "
— Philip K. Dick (What If Our World Is Their Heaven?: The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick)

""Look, Haley's comet!"
~~~
"
— Philip K. Dick