Quotes About Author

When cab drivers recognize me, he decided, it's probably not in my mind. But when the heavens open and God speaks to me by name . . . that's when the psychosis takes over. It would be hard to distinguish.

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

Your certitude is in questionable taste, Mr. Tagomi said. It seems to press untowardly.

If there was any sin, it was that these people wanted to keep having a good time forever, and were punished for that, but, as I say, I feel that, if so, the punishment was far too great, and I prefer to think of it only in a Greek or morally neutral way, as mere science, as deterministic impartial cause-and-effect. I loved them all.

There are celebrated literary lions who've won Pulitzers and Booker prizes for ideas that Dick would toss aside in an early chapter, but … oh, what's the use. You evidently already know the score, because you're reading this.

People suffering nervous breakdowns often do a lot of research, to find explanations for what they are undergoing. The research, of course, fails.

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.

I think Dr. Willis McNelly at the California State University at Fullerton put it best when he said that the true protagonist of an sf story or novel is an idea and not a person. If it is good sf the idea is new, it is stimulating, and, probably most important of all, it sets off a chain-reaction of ramification-ideas in the mind of the reader; it so-to-speak unlocks the reader's mind so that that mind, like the author's, begins to create.

We talked for a while about the area, and then I told Nat about a paper I had written in college about the Roman general Stilicho.

It is the human phosphene response to full-spectrum white, to pure sunlight.

Thank you, Tim Leary, Fat thought. You and your promotion of the joy of expanded consciousness through dope.

is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled; it just tells what the consequences were.

No science in it. Nor set in future. Science fiction deals with future, in particular future where science has advanced over now. Book fits neither premise." "But," Paul said, "it deals with alternate present.

Thank you, Mr. Bibleman, the robot said. 'I am very proud of you.

This is George Robertson," I said. "Mortimer Snead told me there'd be somebody there to talk to me. Maybe Lefty." "Snead?" the cartoon

The phoce, now, seemed to have fallen deeper into his beer-induced trance;

The Four-Faced Visitors of…Ezekiel, by Arthur Orton We are told from our Sunday

Dreamless, like an amoeba, he, too, slept.

A bad emotion, he knew. Curiosity was, especially in Party activities, often a terminal state careerwise.

When a theme is harped on too much you get parody. When we make fun of a stale theme we say we've japed it.

We even have prepared his hokey thesis on psychosomatic factors in death by meteor-strike;

But," Paul said, "it deals with alternate present. Many well-known science fiction novels of that sort.

Religion begins in story. Yes, it does, because religion is an attempt to make sense of what is incomprehensible to us, what is inexplicable, what is awe-inspiring, what is frightening, what moves us to great wonder, and so on. That is the religious impulse, and it is part of our psychological makeup -- of everyone's psychological makeup.

It does not make sense. It cannot exist. It's impossible, and if it isn't impossible, it's irrelevant, and if it isn't either of those things, it's embarrassing.