(3089/898) Phil and Jim

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

Philip K. Dick (1972)
quoted by PKD 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.

[Note: cf. #739 Huxley, #770 Huxley, #2338 Sowell]

287) 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.

Philip K. Dick
"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.

288) 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.

Philip K. Dick
"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.

289) We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind - mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.

J.G. Ballard
Introduction to the French edition (1974) of
Crash (1973)
reprinted in Re/Search no. 8/9 (1984)

290) Science and technology multiple around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.

J.G. Ballard
Introduction to the French edition (1974) of
Crash (1973)
reprinted in Re/Search no. 8/9 (1984)

291) I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again [...] the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.

J.G. Ballard
Interview (10/30/1982) in
Re/Search no. 8/9 (1984)

292) Everywhere - all over Africa and South America [...] you see these suburbs springing up. They represent the optimum of what people want. There's a certain sort of logic leading towards these immaculate suburbs. And they're terrifying, because they are the death of the soul [...] This is the prison this planet is being turned into.

J.G. Ballard
Interview (10/30/1982) in
Re/Search no. 8/9 (1984)

293) All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or ancient Egypt, is reassimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonise past and future. The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality in attractive and instantly appealing forms.

J.G. Ballard
Notes to The Atrocity Exhibition
(written 1967-69, annotated 1990)

294) A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.

J.G. Ballard
"News from the Sun" in
Myths of the Near Future (1982)

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 781 days remaining in the administration of the worst President ever.