Quotes by Philip K. Dick

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

It is proper that technically qualified non-lunatics should sit in judgement on lunatics. How could things be otherwise?

Its easy for you people here; you live a safe, purposeless life, nothing to do, nothing to worry about.

No structure, even an artificial one, enjoys the process of entropy. It is the ultimate fate of everything, and everything resists it.

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

Her smile increased. She had perfect white regular teeth; Irish, Juliana decided. Only Irish blood could give that jawline such femininity.

Well fight back, well fight back, well fight back, a man near Doctor Stockstill was chanting. Stockstill looked at him in astonishment, wondering who he would fight back against. Things were falling on them; did the man intend to fall back upward into the sky in some sort of revenge?

Are―you dying? she asked.Just cant breathe. This air.Poor, poor―good lord. Ive forgotten your name.Hell of a thing.Barney!He clutched her.No! Dont stop! She arched her back. Her teeth chattered.I wasnt going to, he said. Oooaugh!He laughed.Dont please laugh at me.Not meant unkindly.A long silence, then. Then, Oof.

The household was pervaded by this atmosphere of a calm adult woman and a man who gave into animal impulses. She reported to him in great detail what her analyst ... said about his binges and his hostility; she used Charleys money to pay Dr. Andrews to catalog his abnormalities. And of course Charley never heard anything directly from the doctor; he had no way of keeping her from reporting what served her and holding back what did not. The doctor, too, had no way of getting to the truth of what she told him; no doubt she only gave him the facts that suited her picture, so that the doctors picture of Charley was based on what she wanted him to know. By the time she had edited both going and coming there was little of it outside her control.

She makes life over, he realized. She controls life, whereas I just sit on my can and let it happen to me.

On one hand she seems so agile, so athletic, and yet Ive seen her appear so awkward that it embarrassed me. She gives the impression of a hard, worldly adroitness, and in some situations shes like an adolescent: rigid with ancient, middle class attitudes, unable to think for herself, falling back on old verities...victim of her family teaching, shocked by what shocks people, wanting what people usually want. She wants a home, a husband, and her idea of a husband is a man who earns a certain amount of money, helps around the garden, does the dishes...the idea of a good husband thats found in This Week magazine; a viewpoint from the most ordinary stratum, that great ubiquitous world of family life, transmitted from generation to generation. Despite her wild language.

You know what I think? I think youve picked up the Nazi idea that Jews cant create. That they can only imitate and sell. Middlemen. He fixed his merciless scrutiny on Frink.Maybe so, Frink said.

Im sorry, Leon said. I can see you loved your two friends and you miss them, and maybe theyre flying around somewhere in the sky, zipping here and there and being spirits and happy. But you and I and three billion other people are not, and until it changes here it wont be enough, Phil; not enough. Despite the supreme heavenly father. He has to do something for us here, and thats the truth. If you believe in the truth--well, Phil, thats the truth. The harsh, unpleasant truth.

I could see why she felt attracted to Sam K. Barrows. Birds of a feather, or rather lizards of a scale.

Maybe Ill 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.

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.

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.

We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. 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.

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

“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.”