Quotes from Philip K. Dick

He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.

Activity does not necessarily mean life.

No man is infinitely strong; for every creature that runs, flies, hops or crawls there is a terminal nemesis which he will not circumvent, which will finally do him in.

I dreamed: I am the fish whose flesh is eaten, and because I am fat, it is good.

There will come a time when it isn't 'They're spying on me through my phone' anymore. Eventually, it will be 'My phone is spying on me'.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

He started keeping a journal - had been, in fact, secretly doing so for some time: the furtive act of a deranged person.

I am basically analytical, not creative; my writing is simply a creative way of handling analysis.

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're killing yourself with cynicism. Your idols got taken away from you one by one and now you have nothing to give your love to.

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.

I don't write beautifully - I just write reports about our condition.

I used to dig in the garden, and there isn't anything fantastic or ultradimensional about crab grass... unless you are a SF writer, in which case, pretty soon you're viewing crabgrass with suspicion. What are its real motives? And who sent it in the first place? The question I always found myself asking was, 'What is it, really?'

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.

He entered the elevator and together they moved closer to god

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.

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.