Quotes by Philip K. Dick

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesnt go away.”

“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 the words.”

“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.”

“Dont try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We cant talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.”

“The real origin of science fiction lay in the seventeenth-century novels of exploration in fabulous lands. Therefore Jules Vernes story of travel to the moon is not science fiction because they go by rocket but because of where they go. It would be as much science fiction if they went by rubber band.”

“Reality is whatever refuses to go away when I stop believing in it.”

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.

To live is to be haunted.

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

This is a mournful discovery.1)Those who agree with you are insane2)Those who do not agree with you are in power.

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 shouldnt 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 its 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 cant explain his to us, and we cant 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.

Everybody knows that Aristotelian two-value logic is fucked.

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

Everything is true, he said. Everything anybody has ever thought.Will you be all right?Ill be all right, he said, and thought, And Im going to die. Both those are true, too.

We are all insects. Groping towards something terrible or divine.

They ought to make it a binding clause that if you find God you get to keep Him.