(3089/898) That Dick guy

131) [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)

132) It was either Phil [Dick] or [Ace editor] Terry Carr who came up with the idea of an Ace Double edition of the Holy Bible. One of these days Ace will print the Holy Bible as a Double, back to back, the Old Testament and the New Testament each cut to exactly 30,000 words, the Old Testament titled Master of Chaos and the New Testament titled The Thing That Frees Souls.

Poul Anderson
posthumous appreciation of Philip K. Dick in
Locus magazine #256 (5/82)
quoted by Gregg Rickman in
To The High Castle; Philip K. Dick:
A Life 1928-1962 (1989)

[Note: In Divine Invasions by Lawrence Sutin, Karen Anderson, wife of Poul Anderson, is quoted. In this version of the anecdote, each half is 20,000 words, and the New Testament is The Things with Three Souls. In e-mail from Arthur Hlavaty (5/28/95) the Old Testament is given as Wargod of Israel and the New Testament as The Thing with Three Souls]

133) Writer X may sell 500,000 copies. All those 500,000 people may think, nice book. I liked it. I'll read the guy's next one. And 40,000 people may read a Phil Dick book, and be loud and vocal and persuasive about feeling the book had incredible impact on them intellectually and emotionally. The guy with the 500,000 will not be seen as a major writer and the guy with the 40,000 will. Because nobody's talking about the guy with the 500,000 readers.

Russ Galen, Philip K. Dick's agent
quoted by Gregg Rickman in
To The High Castle; Philip K. Dick:
A Life 1928-1962 (1989)

134) In one of the most brilliant papers in the English language [David] Hume made it clear that what we speak of as 'causality' is nothing more than the phenomenon of repetition. When we mix sulphur with saltpeter and charcoal we *always* get gunpowder. This is true of every event subsumed by a causal law - in other words, everything which can be called scientific knowledge. "It is custom which rules," Hume said, and in that one sentence undermined both science and philosophy.

Philip K. Dick
"The Day the Gods Stopped Laughing"
[unpublished article written in the late 60's]
quoted by Gregg Rickman in
To The High Castle; Philip K. Dick:
A Life 1928-1962 (1989)

135) Custom, then, is the great guide of human life.

David Hume
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) [B15]

Sources

[B15] - Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 15th edition (1980)


Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 855 days remaining in the administration of the worst President ever.