Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick
Dec 16, 1928 - March 2, 1982

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

(1972)
quoted by Dick in "How to Build A Universe
That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" (written 1978)
published in I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon (1985)
reprinted in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick (1995),
Lawrence Sutin, ed.

One of the most effective forms of industrial or military sabotage limits itself to damage that can never be thoroughly proven -- or even proven at all -- to be anything deliberate. It is like an invisible political movement; perhaps it isn't there at all. If a bomb is wired to a car's ignition, then obviously there is an enemy; if public building or a political headquarters is blown up, then there is a political enemy. But if an accident, or a series of accidents, occurs, if equipment merely fails to function, if it appears faulty, especially in a slow fashion, over a period of natural time, with numerous small failures and misfirings- then the victim, whether a person or a party or a country, can never marshal itself to defend itself.

A Scanner Darkly (1977)

Fear ... can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy. If you're afraid you don't commit yourself to life completely; fear makes you always, always hold something back.

Flow My Tear, The Policeman Said (1974)

[Philip K.] Dick's fiction calls up our basic cultural assumptions, requires us to reexamine them, and points out the destructive destinations to which they are carrying us. The American Dream may have succeeded as a means of survival in the wilderness of early America; it allowed us to subdue that wilderness and build our holy cities of materialism. But now, the images in Dick's fiction declare, we live in a new kind of wilderness, a wasteland wilderness, because those cities and the culture that built them are in decay. We need a new American dream to overcome this wasteland.

Patricia S. Warrick
Mind in Motion: The Fiction of Philip K. Dick (1987)

I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel & story writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, &, for them, my corpus of writing is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an investigation & presentation, analysis & response & personal history. My audience will always be limited to those people.

(1981)
In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis (1991)
edited by Lawrence Sutin

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

letter to Patricia Warrick (5/17/78)
Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick: v.5 1977-1979

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.

"How to Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" (1978)

The worlds through which Philip Dick's character's move are subject to cancellation or revision without notice.

Roger Zelazny (attributed)

Spinoza saw ... that if a falling stone could reason, it would think, "I want to fall at the rate of thirty-two feet per second per second."

"The Android and the Human" (1972)
reprinted in The Dark-Haired Girl (1988)

Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would not call that a disease but an error of judgment.

A Scanner Darkly (1977)

Forty-two. His age had astounded him for years, and each time that he had sat so astounded, trying to figure out what had become of the young, slim man in his twenties, a whole additional year slipped by and had to be recorded, a continually growing sum which he could not reconcile with his self-image. He still saw himself, in his mind's eye, as youthful, and when he caught sight of himself in photographs he usually collapsed ... Somebody took my actual physical presence away and substituted this, he had thought from time to time. Oh well, so it went.

A Maze of Death (1970)

Science Fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.

"How to Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" (1978)

Can any of us fix anything? No. None of us can do that. We're specialized. Each one of us has his own line, his own work. I understand my work, you understand yours. The tendency in evolution is toward greater and greater specialization. Man's society is an ecology that forces adaptation to it. Continued complexity makes it impossible for us to know anything outside our own personal field - I can't follow the work of the man sitting at the next desk over from me. Too much knowledge has piled up in each field. And there are too many fields.

"The Variable Man" (short story, 1953)
The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick, v.1:
The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford (1987)

I, for one, bet on science as helping us. I have yet to see how it fundamentally endangers us, even with the H-bomb lurking about. Science has given us more lives than it has taken; we must remember that.

"Self Portrait" (1968)

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.

"Man, Androids and Machine" (1975)

To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement ... Whoever defeats the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus ... thereby it becomes its enemies.

Valis (1981)