Quotes from Philip K. Dick

What is identity? he asked himself. Where does the act end? Nobody knows.

It isn't a brute instinct that keeps us restless and dissatisfied. I'll tell you what it is: it's the highest goal of man - the need to grow and advance . . . to find new things . . . to expand. To spread out, reach areas, experiences, comprehend and live in an evolving fashion. To push aside routine and repetition, to break out of mindless monotony and thrust forward. To keep moving on . . .

Philosophical involvement blinded me to authentic human fact.

We'll fight back, we'll fight back, we'll 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?

The Public School, he had long ago decided, was neurotic. It wanted a world in which nothing new came about, in which there were no surprises. And that was the world of the compulsive-obsessive neurotic; it was not a healthy world at all.

I've always told people that for each person there is a sentence--a series of words--which has the power to destroy him. When Fat told me about Leon Stone I realized (this came years after the first realization) that another sentence exists, another series of words, which will heal the person. If you're lucky you will get the second; but you can be certain of getting the first: that is the way it works.

This is a cardboard universe, and if you lean too long or too heavily against it, you fall through.

Whom the gods notice they destroy. Be small… and you will escape the jealousy of the great.

I have never yielded to reality.

I even gave up, for a while, stopping by the window of the room to look out at the lights and deep, illuminated streets. That's a form of dying, that losing contact with the city like that.

The inanity of her remark infuriated him. 'Good grief don't you understand Janet? At this point I'm thoroughly delusional. I'm as mentally ill as it's possible to be. It's incredible that I can communicate with you at all. It's a credit to my ego-strength that I'm not at this point totally autistic.

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, Dick wrote of these stories. 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.

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

Ruth said, 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. Love is-she paused, reflecting-like a father saving his children from a burning house, getting them out and dying himself. When you love you cease to live for yourself; you live for another person.

The greatest power one human being can exert over others is to control their perceptions of reality, and infringe on the integrity and individuality of their world. This is done in politics, in psychotherapy.

Flow my tears, fall from your springs! Exiled forever let me mourn; Where night's black bird her sad infamy sings, There let me live forlorn.

Ubik ... Safe when taken as directed.

Isn't a beautiful dream better than a cruel reality?

if men are too blind to govern themselves, how can they be trusted to govern others?

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.

We live in a society where detachment is almost essential.

It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that's what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them unglued, and I like to see how how the characters in the novel cope with this problem. I have a scret love of chaos. There should be more of it.

But reality really is a mess, and yet it's exciting. The basic thing is, how frightened are you of chaos? And how happy are you with order? Van Vogt influenced me so much because he made me appreciate a mysterious chaotic quality in the universe which is not to be feared.

Also, I do seem attracted to trash, as if the clue--the clue--lies there. I'm always ferreting out elliptical points, odd angles. What I write doesn't make a whole lot of sense. There is fun and religion and psychotic horror strewn about like a bunch of hats. Also, there is a social or sociological drift--rather than toward the hard sciences, the overall impression is childish but interesting.