Philip K. Dick

Philip Kindred Dick (1928 - 1982)

science fiction author

• "My major preoccupation is the question, 'What is reality?' Many of my stories and novels deal with psychotic states or drug-induced states by which I can present the concept of a multiverse rather than a universe. Music and sociology are themes in my novels, also radical political trends; in particular I've written about fascism and my fear of it."
  • Source: Dictionary of Literary Biography, 1981 ed., vol. 8, part 1. Attributed as "These interests were in part summarized in 1975 by Dick..."

Sourced:

• "Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night."
  • Source: What The Dead Men Say (1964 )

• "We hypothesize information into objects. Rearrangements of objects in the change in the content of the information. The message has changed. This is a language we have lost the ability to read. We ourselves are part of this language; changes in us are changes in the content of information. We ourselves are information-rich; information is entered into us, is processed and then is projected outwards once more, now in an altered form. We are not aware that we are doing this, that in fact this is all we are doing."
  • Source: Valis

• "Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane."
  • Source: Valis

• "They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyhow."
  • Source: A Scanner Darkly

• "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
  • Source: I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon (1980 )

• "Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups...So 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. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing."
  • Source: How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later

• "It was evident to Elias Tate that this was the government. First they shake hands with you, he thought, and then they murder you."
  • Source: The Divine Invasion

• "For Mercer everything is easy, he thought, because Mercer accepts everything. Nothing is alien to him. But what I've done, he thought; that's become alien to me. In fact everything has become unnatural; I've become an unnatural self."
  • Source: "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? "

Unsourced

"Giving me a new idea is like giving an idiot a gun. Thank you anyway, bang bang."

"When two people dream the same dream, it ceases to be an illusion."