Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
Philip K. Dick
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.
It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.
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.
We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed, and some alteration in reality occurs. We have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the present - deja vu.
Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.
This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance.
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.
Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.
Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error of judgment.
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?'
Comprehension follows perception.
I dreamed: I am the fish whose flesh is eaten, and because I am fat, it is good.
The core of my writing is not art but truth.
I am basically analytical, not creative; my writing is simply a creative way of handling analysis.
The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three dimensional and not in space or time.
Reality, by itself, becomes a story by Philip K. Dick.
I don't write beautifully - I just write reports about our condition.
In 1955, when I'd write a science-fiction novel, I'd set it in the year 2000. I realised around 1977 that, 'My God, it's getting exactly like those novels we used to write in the 1950s!' Everything's just turning out to be real.
When I believe, I am crazy. When I don't believe, I suffer psychotic depression.
The trouble with being educated is that it takes a long time; it uses up the better part of your life and when you are finished what you know is that you would have benefited more by going into banking.
The two basic topics which fascinate me are 'What is reality?' and 'What constitutes the authentic human being?'
I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist.
Movies like 'Westworld' used ideas I'd thought of a long time ago.
The Martians are always coming.
I saw a segment of Douglas Trumbull's special effects for 'Blade Runner' on the KNBC-TV news. I recognized it immediately. It was my own interior world. They caught it perfectly.
I am one of the elect, one of the few in the know, in the gnosis.
If you can get them to see the world as you do, they will think as you do.
The ultimate problem confronting me all my life has been the senseless injury to and neglect of my sister.
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.
