Philip K. Dick Quotes

Insanity - to have to construct a picture of one's life, by making inquiries of others.

Don't never participate in no bad scenes, he reminded himself; that was his motto in life.

I mean, knowing people, people are terrified of the unknown and they want to just kill the unknown.

In this dark world where he now dwelt, ugly things and surprising things and once in a long while a tiny wondrous thing spilled out at him constantly; he could count on nothing.

You must beware of seeing malice behind accidental injury.

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.

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

The church of my choice is the free, open world.

Either I've invented a whole new logic or, ahem, I'm not playing with a full deck.

I never liked the idea of doing what a machine says. I hate having to salute something built in a factory.

Death hides within every religion. And at any time it can flash forth-not with healing in its wings but with poison, with that which wounds.

Every time I see a picture of Stalin I look him square in the eye and I say: You're a meat eater, Joseph.

In a nutshell-I fear authority but at the same time I resent it-the authority and my own fear. So I rebel.

You mean old books?" "Stories written before space travel but about space travel." "How could there have been stories about space travel before --" "The writers," Pris said, "made it up.

Men and the world are mutually toxic to each other.

Life ... is only heavy and none else; there is only the one trip, all heavy. Heavy that leads to the grave. For everyone and everything.

Little kids are that way; they feel if their parents aren't watching what they do then what they do isn't real.

The cries of the dead are terrible indeed; you should try not to hear them.

My life and creative work are justified and completed by Blade Runner.

But at least he can still see the lights below us. Although maybe for him it doesn't matter.

Life is short, he thought. Art, or something not life, is long, stretching out endless, like [a] concrete worm. Flat, white, unsmoothed by any passage over or across it.

Every junkie, he thought, is a recording.

Guilt -- if there was any guilt -- spread out and diffused itself over everybody and everything. . . . Perhaps at some point in time, at some spot in the world, a moment of responsibility existed.

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

A child of today can detect a lie quicker than the wisest adult of two decades ago. When I want to know what is true, I ask my children.

Can we consider the universe real, and if so, in what way?

Giving me a a new idea is like handing a cretin a gun, but I do thank you anyhow, bang bang.

How'd you like to gaze at a beer can throughout eternity? It might not be so bad. There'd be nothing to fear.

In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real.

Can anyone alter fate? All of us combined... or one great figure... or someone strategically placed, who happens to be in the right spot. Chance. Accident. And our lives, our world, hanging on it.

You know how people are about not taking care of an animal; they consider it immoral and antiempathic. I mean, technically it's not a crime like it was right after WWT but the feeling's still there.

I love you,' Rachael said. 'If I entered a room and found a sofa covered with your hide I'd score very high on the Voigt-Kampff test.

Upon him the contempt of three planets descended.

I was twelve when I read my first sf magazine

I'd like to see you move up to the goat class, where I think you belong.

The silence of the world could not rein back it's greed. Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won.

Are we to assist it in gaining power in order to save our lives? Is that the paradox of our earthly situation?

We should take mothers in high seas and drown them there, they are as poisonous as lead in the air.

And of course, in my writing, there is the constant theme of music, love of, preoccupation with, music. Music is the single thread making my life into a coherency.

What is possible and what is not possible is not objectively known but is, rather, a subjective belief on the part of the author and of the reader.

What scared me the most was when my father would put on the gasmask. His face would disappear... This was not a human being at all.

Madness, like small fish, runs in hosts, in vast numbers of instances.

We have entered a Moment when we are alone. We cannot get assistance, as before. Well, Mr. Tagomi thought, perhaps that too is good. Or can be made good. One must still try to find the Way.

Amazed, Fat said, "She's decomposing and yet she's still giving birth?" "Only to monsters," Dr. Stone said.

I have seen myself backward.

He entered the elevator and together they moved closer to god

I started reading SF when I was about twelve and I read all I could, so any author who was writing about that time, I read. But there's no doubt who got me off originally and that was A. E. van Vogt.

Writing is a lonely way of life. You shut yourself up in your study and work and work.

Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair.

The basic thing is, how frightened are you of chaos? And how happy are you with order?