Philip K. Dick Quotes & Sayings

The dissatisfaction of the masses is not based on economic deprivation but on a sense of ineffectually. Not an increased standard of living, but more social power, is their fundamental goal, because of their emotional orientation, they arise and act when a powerful leader-figure can coordinate them into a functioning unit rather than a chaotic mass of unformed elements. Dill — Philip K. Dick

I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, then do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be. — Philip K. Dick

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

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

This kind of neighborhood did not please him; he had seen it a million times, duplicated throughout the face of the earth. It had been from such as this that he had fled, early in his life, to use his sixness as a method of getting out. And now he had come back.
He did not object to the people: he saw them as trapped here, the ordinaries, who through no fault of their own had to remain. They had not invented it; they did not like it; they endured it, as he had not had to. In fact, he felt guilty, seeing their grim faces, their turned-down mouths. Jagged, unhappy mouths. — Philip K. Dick

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

You put on a bishop's robe and miter, he pondered, and walk around in that, and people bow and genuflect and like that, and try to kiss your ring, if not your ass, and pretty soon you're a bishop. So to speak. What is identity? he asked himself. Where does the act end? Nobody knows. — Philip K. Dick

But change's always harsh on the loser. Nothing new. — Philip K. Dick

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. — Philip K. Dick

That I am in direct mind-to-mind touch with extraterrestrial intelligence systems has been obvious to me for some time, but what this means is not in any way obvious. — Philip K. Dick

Is it a loss?" Rachael repeated. "I don't really know; I have no way to tell. How does it feel to have a child? How does it feel to be born, for that matter? We're not born; we don't grow up; instead of dying from illness or old age, we wear out like ants. Ants again; that's what we are. Not you; I mean me. Chitinous reflex-machines who aren't really alive." She twisted her head to one side, said loudly, "I'm not alive! — Philip K. Dick

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. — Philip K. Dick

There's something in the Bible about falling sparrows,' Kevin said. 'About his eye being on them. That's what's wrong with God: he only has one eye. — Philip K. Dick

If you are wise, Matson said to himself grimly, you never take one-way trips. Anywhere. Even to Boise, Idaho ... even across the street. Be certain, when you start, that you can scramble back. — Philip K. Dick

Everything wears out eventually; nothing is permanent. Change is the one constant of life. — Philip K. Dick

But as he plodded along a vague and almost hallucinatory pall hazed over his mind; he found himself at one point, with no notion of how it could be, a step from an almost certain fatal cliffside fall - falling humiliatingly and helplessly, he thought; on and on, with no one even to witness it. Here there existed no one to record his or anyone else's degradation, and any courage or pride which might manifest itself here at the end would go unmarked: the dead stones, the dust-stricken weeds dry and dying, perceived nothing, recollected nothing, about him or themselves. — Philip K. Dick

The pain, so unexpected and undeserved, had for some reason cleared away the cobwebs. I realized I didn't hate the cabinet door, I hated my life ... My house, my family, my backyard, my power mower. Nothing would ever change; nothing new could ever be expected. It had to end, and it did. Now in the dark world where I dwell, ugly things, and surprising things, and sometimes little wondrous things, spill out in me constantly, and I can count on nothing. — Philip K. Dick

The Christian-Islamic Church, of course, wanted both the Bible and the Koran frozen forever. — Philip K. Dick

Oh no," she said, still smiling; her eyes poured over with light, that of compassion. She understood how he felt, that this was not an impulse only. But the answer was still no, and, he knew, it would always — Philip K. Dick

Stuart said, "I hid once in the sidewalk. Do I have to do that again?" He looked around at the rest of them, seeking an answer. "Yes," Bonny said. "Then I will," he said. "But I came up out of the sidewalk; I didn't stay there. And I'll come up again. — Philip K. Dick

One cannot judge by book being best seller. We all know that. Many best sellers are terrible trash. — Philip K. Dick

My major preoccupation is the question, 'What is reality?' — Philip K. Dick

Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not, therefore, go along willingly with it. — Philip K. Dick

I think that, like in my writing, reality is always a soap bubble, Silly Putty thing anyway. In the universe people are in, people put their hands through the walls, and it turns out
they're living in another century entirely. I often have the feeling - and it does show up in my books - that this is all just a stage. — Philip K. Dick

Life which we can no longer distinguish; life carefully buried up to its forehead in the carcass of a dead world. In every cinder of the universe Mercer probably perceives inconspicuous life. Now I know, he thought. And once having seen through Mercer's eyes, I probably will never stop. — Philip K. Dick

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

Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments, and altered states. — Philip K. Dick

If men are too blind to govern themselves, how can they be trusted to govern others? — Philip K. Dick

I use this as a paradigm for our whole attitude toward life, what you did was you worked very hard, you try to understand and try to direct these complicated, powerful forces and at the very end of the struggle you've made no progress at all. That upon discovering that, you've raised to a lofty moral height, and you've accepted your fate, and somehow went on. — Philip K. Dick

On one hand she seems so agile, so athletic, and yet I've seen her appear so awkward that it embarrassed me. She gives the impression of a hard, worldly adroitness, and in some situations she's 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 that's 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. — Philip K. Dick

What is the space which this speaks of? Vertical ascent. To heaven. Of time? Into the light-world of the mutable. Yes, this thing has disgorged its spirit: light. And my attention is fixed; I can't look away. Spellbound by mesmerizing shimmering surface which I can no longer control. No longer free to dismiss. — Philip K. Dick

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. — Philip K. Dick

If I'm an andy," Phil Resch said, "and you kill me, you can have my squirrel. Here; I'll write it out, willing it to you. — Philip K. Dick

Why does a man cry? he wondered. Not like a woman; not for that. Not for sentiment. A man cries over the loss of something, something alive. A man can cry over a sick animal that he knows won't make it. The death of a child: a man can cry for that. But not because things are sad.
A man, he thought, cries not for the future or the past but for the present. — Philip K. Dick

I pity the small creatures the most, he thought. Those who have done the least harm. They above all do not deserve this. The goat-thing will single them out for the greatest suffering; it will afflict them in proportion to their innocence ... this is its method by which the great balance is tilted from rectitude, and the Plan undone. It will accuse the weak and destroy the helpless; it will use its power against those least able to defend themselves. And, most of all, it will devour the little hopes, the meager dreams of the small.
Here we must intervene, he said to himself. To protect the small. This is our first task and the first line of our defense. — Philip K. Dick

Make it?" Fred echoed. "Make what? The team? The chick? Make good? Make out? Make sense? Make money? Make time? Define your turns. The Latin for 'make' is facere, which also reminds me of fuckere, which is Latin for 'to fuck', and I haven't ... — 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

Horselover Fat's nervous breakdown began the day he got the phone call from Gloria asking if he had any Nembutals. — Philip K. Dick

Better a live dog than a dead prince — Philip K. Dick

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

Okay? You'll be a knockout. Listen, we'll buy a bottle of high-price Scotch and take it along. That Vat 69.' Frank, — Philip K. Dick

I am life,' the girl said.
'What?' he said, startled.
'To you, I am life. What are you, thirty-eight? Forty? What have you learned? Have you done anything? Look at me, look. I'm life and when you're done with me, some of it rubs off on you. You don't feel so old now, do you? With me here in the squib beside you.'
Nick said, 'I'm thirty-four and I don't feel old. As a matter of fact, sitting here with you makes me feel older, not younger. Nothing is rubbing off.'
'It will,' she said. — Philip K. Dick

The painting showed a hairless, oppressed creature with a head like an inverted pear, its hands clapped in horror to its ears, its mouth open in a vast, soundless scream. Twisted ripples of the creature's torment, echoes of its cry, flooded out into the air surrounding it; the man or woman, whichever it was, had become contained by its own howl. It had covered its ears against its own sound. The creature stood on a bridge and no one else was present; the creature screamed in isolation. Cut off by - or despite - its outcry. — Philip K. Dick

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. — Philip K. Dick

That is the artist's job: take mineral rock from dark silent earth, transform it into shining light-reflecting form from sky. — Philip K. Dick

Yes, these new young people, of the rising generation, who did not remember the days before the war or even the war itself - they were the hope of the world. — Philip K. Dick

Love isn't just wanting another person the way you want to own an object you see in a store. That's just desire. You want to have it around, take it home and set it up somewhere in the apartment like a lamp. — Philip K. Dick

FRECK: (Casually) I bought a methedrine plant today. BARRIS: (With a snotty expression on his face) Methedrine is a benny, like speed; it's crank, it's crystal, it's amphetamine, it's made synthetically in a lab. So it isn't organic, like pot. There's no such thing as a methedrine plant like there is a pot plant. FRECK: (Springing the punch line on him) I mean I inherited forty thousand from an uncle and purchased a plant hidden in this dude's garage where he makes methedrine. I mean, he's got a factory there where he manufactures meth. — Philip K. Dick

Someday, he thought, it'll be mandatory that we all sell the McDonald's hamburger as well as buy it; we'll sell it back and forth to each other forever from our living rooms. That way we won't even have to go outside. — Philip K. Dick

And," my dad concluded, calming down a little, "all our dignity consists in just that. I mean, man's little and can't fill time and space, but he sure can make use of the brain God gave him. — Philip K. Dick

It has been said of dreams that they are a 'controlled psychosis,' or, put another way, a psychosis is a dream breaking through during waking hours. — Philip K. Dick

But then I realized how unhealthy it was, sensing the absence of life, not just in this building but everywhere, and not reacting - do you see? I guess you don't. But that used to be considered a sign of mental illness; they called it 'absence of appropriate affect. — Philip K. Dick

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

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. — Philip K. Dick

The tragedy in his life already existed. To love an atmospheric spirit. That was the real sorrow. Hopelessness itself. Nowhere on the printed page, nowhere in the annals of man, would her name appear: no local habitation, no name. There are girls like that, he thought, and those you love most, the ones where there is no hope because it has eluded you at the very moment you close your hands around it. — Philip K. Dick

No rational response was possible. Her irrationality made it so. The terrible power, he thought, of illogic. — Philip K. Dick

She's so - well, maybe she is a witch. I mean, maybe that's what witches were ... old women with strange talents. Like her - being able to pass through time. — Philip K. Dick

I've been waiting a long time for last year. But I guess it's just not coming again. — Philip K. Dick

As the spring rains fall, soaking in them, on the roof, is a child's rag ball. — Philip K. Dick

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. — Philip K. Dick

Typical of their mania for the trivial, their legalistic fascination with documents, proclamations, ads. — Philip K. Dick

If you or I ever really accepted the moral responsibility for what we've done in our lifetime - we'd drop dead or go mad. Living creatures weren't made to understand what they do. — Philip K. Dick

Law of economy: nothing is waste. Even the unreal. What a sublimity in the process. — Philip K. Dick

Madness has its own dynamism. It just goes on. — Philip K. Dick

Pious people spoke to God, and crazy people imagined that God spoke back. — Philip K. Dick

Each of us assumes everyone else knows what HE is doing. They all assume we know what WE are doing. We don't ... Nothing is going on and nobody knows what it is. Nobody is concealing anything except the fact that he does not understand anything anymore and wishes he could go home. — Philip K. Dick

Fear made her seem ill; it distorted her body lines, made her appear as if someone had broken her, and then, with malice, patched her together badly. — Philip K. Dick

What you should do," she told Fat during one of his darker hours, "is get into studying the characteristics of the T-34." Fat asked what that was. It turned out that Sherri had read a book on Russion armor during World War Two. The T-34 tank had been the Soviet Union's salvation and thereby the salvation of all the Allied Powers- and, by extension, Horselover Fat's, since without the T-34 he would be speaking - not english or Latin or the koine - but German. — Philip K. Dick

We're all dreaming, Arctor said. If the last to know he's an addict is the addict, then maybe the last to know when a man means what he says is the man himself, he reflected. He wondered how much of the garbage that Donna had overheard he had seriously meant. He wondered how much of the insanity of the day
his insanity
had been real, or just induced as a contact lunacy, by the situation. Donna, always, was a pivot point of reality for him; for her this was the basic, natural question. He wished he could answer. — Philip K. Dick

Back to Germany," one of the cops said, surveying him. "I'm an American," Frank Frink said. "You're a Jew," the cop said. — Philip K. Dick

But in the end I decided against it. The hell with the newspapers. Nobody reads the letters to the editor column except more nuts. The whole world is full of nuts. It's enough to get you down. — Philip K. Dick

That is not how you do it; you do not solve one problem with another, greater problem. — Philip K. Dick

It is the human phosphene response to full-spectrum white, to pure sunlight. — Philip K. Dick

In the enormous whale-belly of steel and stone carved out to form the long-enduring old opera house, Rick Deckard found an echoing, noisy, slightly miscontrived rehearsal taking place. — Philip K. Dick

I'm not an intellectual - Fascism has no need of that. What is wanted is the deed. Theory derives from action. What our corporate state demands from us is comprehension of the social forces - of history. You — Philip K. Dick

You must beware of seeing malice behind accidental injury. — Philip K. Dick

In a foolish and loud manner he had argued politics; he had been rude in his disagreeing, and only the adroit tact of his host had sufficed to save the evening. How much I have to learn, Childan thought. They're so graceful and polite. And I - the white barbarian. It is true. — Philip K. Dick

To save one life, Mr Tagomi had to take two. The logical, balanced mind cannot make sense of that — Philip K. Dick

And this is the straight dope, right here. These people are not exactly human. They don the dress but they're like monkeys dolled up in the circus. They're clever and can learn, but that is all. — Philip K. Dick

In marriage the greatest hatred that is possible between human beings can be generated, perhaps because of the constant proximity, perhaps because once there was love. The intimacy is still there, even though the love element has disappeared. So a will to power, a struggle for domination, comes into being. — Philip K. Dick

That thing that's taken refuge there in that zinc bucket, without a wife, a career, a conapt, or money or the possibility of encountering any of these, still persists. For reasons unknown to me its stake in existence is greater than mine. — Philip K. Dick

The massively built old man was tired, despite his customary show of energy. I guess when you get up into that bracket, Herbert decided, you have to act in a certain way; you have to appear more than a human with merely ordinary failings. — Philip K. Dick

My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression. — Philip K. Dick

But I consider that the matter of defining what is real - that is a serious topic, even a vital topic. And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the authentic human. Because the bombardment of pseudo- realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans - as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. My two topics are really one topic; they unite at this point. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland. You can have the Pirate Ride or the Lincoln Simulacrum or Mr. Toad's Wild Ride - you can have all of them, but none is true. — Philip K. Dick

Maintained his stance of cynicism, could not speak from grief; the two of them drove along and then Kevin slapped him on the shoulder, which is the only avenue open to men to show love for each other. — Philip K. Dick

One constant has prevailed, though, throughout all theories. There must indeed be a mysterious Holy Spirit which has an exact and intimate relation to Christ, which can indwell in human minds, guide and inform them, and even express itself through those humans, even without their awareness. — Philip K. Dick

It is over, isn't it?" Trustingly, he seemed to be waiting for her to tell him, as if she would know. As if hearing himself say it meant nothing; he had a dubious attitude toward his own words; they didn't become real, not until she agreed.

"It's over," she said. — Philip K. Dick

I will go, he said to himself. Before I die I'll see Mars. — Philip K. Dick

We are all insects. Groping towards something terrible or divine. — Philip K. Dick

Amanda Werner and several other beautiful, elegant, conically breasted foreign ladies, from unspecified vaguely defined countries, plus a few bucolic co-called humorists, comprised Buster's perpetual core of repeats. Women like Amanda Werner never made movies, never appeared in plays; they lived out their queer, beautiful lives as guests on Buster's unending show, appearing, Isidore had once calculated, as much as seventy hours a week. — Philip K. Dick

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. — Philip K. Dick

His projected face bony and intense, Garth peered out of his booth like an aroused turtle. — Philip K. Dick

Blood, Herr Reiss, can never be eradicated like ink. — Philip K. Dick

The termination of a relationship," he said, "is not a misunderstanding. It's a reorganization of life. — Philip K. Dick

Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane. Or you are becoming sane, finally. Waking up. — Philip K. Dick

Tears began to surge up into her eyes, and she found herself doubling up her fists, with the thumbs inside, as she had done as a child; she felt her jaw wobble, and when she spoke her voice could hardly be heard. — Philip K. Dick

Mors certa, vita incerta, as Mr. Sloat occasionally declared. Isidore, although he had heard the expression a number of times, retained only a dim notion as to its meaning. After all, if a chickenhead could fathom Latin he would cease to be a chickenhead. — Philip K. Dick

You know what the doctor said to me to cheer me up?" Fat said. "There are worse diseases than cancer."
"Did he show you slides?"
We both laughed. When you are nearly crazy with grief, you laugh at what you can. — Philip K. Dick

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

They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed
run over, maimed, destroyed
but they continued to play anyhow. — Philip K. Dick