Novelists From The United States

"Jackpot trilogy quotes"

"Blue Ant trilogy quotes"

"Bridge trilogy quotes"

"Sprawl trilogy quotes"

"Is it real? Does it matter?"

"To call Philip K. Dick ... a science-fiction writer is to underscore the inadequacy of the label. ... It would be more accurate to call him one of the most valiant psychological explorers of the 20th century."

"The worlds through which Philip Dick's characters move are subject to cancellation or revision without notice. Reality is approximately as dependable as a politician's promise."

"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."

"What Franz Kafka was to the first half of the 20th century, Philip K. Dick is to the second half."

"One of the American science fiction writers I admire most is Philip K. Dick, and Philip K. Dick's world involves immense tracts of pure insanity. It's a world which is always in danger of falling to pieces. It is an accurate picture of what is going on in a lot of people's heads and how the world actually does affect us—this weird, disjointed, unexpected world we're living in now. Well now, Phil Dick reflects that by using a sane, matter-of-fact prose to describe the completely insane things that happen in his novels. It is a way of mirroring reality. Peyton Place is a fine trivial example of non-realism. What reality is that reflecting? Nothing. A literary pseudo-reality where everybody goes to bed all the time with each other. It doesn't exist, you know; it has no relevance. It is escapism. Whereas serious science fiction is a modern literary device for handling this insane world we live in."

"only snobbery or ignorance apologizes for liking science fiction anymore, with writers like Philip K. Dick and Gene Wolfe around…You could almost call The Lathe of Heaven, "Homage à Dick." I was openly, I trust, acknowledging the influence. My approach was like saying, "This is one great way to write a novel, invented by Philip K. Dick.""

""I'm getting awfully choosy in my science fiction reading at this point; I have read too much. It's not science fiction's fault, it's my fault. I've O.D.'d on it. I'm full up. I know all the plots. But there are some writers I can read without question and with pleasure and joy, like Vonda McIntyre. Or Gene Wolfe...And, with a kind of bitterness in my heart, I have to say that I think probably the best American science fiction writer alive is still Philip K. Dick, although he let me down really badly when he turned against abortion rights and women. He still is a superb artist, one of the best novelists we have got. My favorite is Martian Time Slip. This is a man who has never been recognized by any critic of any stature. He has never had a decent edition of any of his books. They come out in these ratty little paper backs with gaudy covers and go out of print again, but I tell you, he is one of the best we've got going."

"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."

"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 with Three Souls."

"[H]e never went anywhere, and never left his house. I didn't realize what a big deal it was then, but the older I get, the less I want to go anywhere. We live in the mountains, on a dirt road, in the middle of nowhere. ... He didn't like driving either. I remember he had a car for about three or four years before he passed away and it only had about 600 miles on it."

"[He would spend] three days straight writing a couple hundred pages. I didn't get any sleep either because every ten minutes [he would ask] "How do you spell _____, I need some coffee, Is there any food?" ...He'd lay down for about ten minutes, get up again, and write some more."

"Philip Dick does not lead his critics an easy life, since he does not so much play the part of a guide through his phantasmagoric worlds as give the impression of one lost in their labyrinth."

"There are no heroes in Dick's books, but there are heroics. One is reminded of Dickens: what counts is the honesty, constancy, kindness and patience of ordinary people."

"I have no guilt regarding my love of fantasy and science fiction, only pleasure. I grew up reading the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I chuckle over how this “genre” has become mainstream and how time travel, alternative universes and magic are now so everyday. Plus, no one could ever feel guilty about reading writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and Philip K. Dick."

"[Dick's] chosen manner of writing … [is] comparable to downhill racing. The results can be spectacular, though often the spectacle provided is one of disaster."

"The greatest menace that faces the human being in the 20th century is the coming into existence in our times of the totalitarian state, which can take many forms."

"It seems to me that in many ways, ideas have a life of their own. They appear to seize on people and make use of them."

"There is a major flaw in America, which does not appear to exist in France: the American people are basically anti-intellectual. They're not interested in novels of ideas. And science fiction is essentially the field of ideas. And the anti-intellectualism of Americans prohibits their interest in imaginative ideas [and] in intellectual concepts."

"To live is to be haunted."

"He awoke—and wanted Mars. The valleys, he thought. What would it be like to trudge among them? Great and greater yet: the dream grew as he became fully conscious, the dream and the yearning. He could almost feel the enveloping presence of the other world, which only Government agents and high officials had seen. A clerk like himself? Not likely."

"How can I join one of the parties? All their slogans and propaganda, it seems so damn - silly. How the hell can I get exited about clean teeth and underarm odor. People kill each other over these trifles... it doesn't make sense. There's going to be suicidal civil war, if that amendment passes, and I'm supposed to join one side or the other?"

"The emotional masses of ordinary people who resented the Great Work, the bombs and bacteria and guided missiles, were coming to the surface. The were rising up - finally. Putting an end to super-logic: rationality without responsibility."

"Loyce gazed up, rigid with horror. The splotch of darkness, hanging over the City Hall. Darkness so thick it seemed almost solid. In the vortex something moved. Flickering shapes. Things, descending from the sky, pausing momentarily above the City Hall, fluttering over it in a dense swarm and then dropping silently onto the roof. Shapes. Fluttering shapes from the sky. From the crack of darkness that hung above him. He was seeing—them."

"Each of us assumes everyone else knows what HE is doing. They all assume we know what WE are doing. We don't ... Nothing is going on and nobody knows what it is. Nobody is concealing anything except the fact that he does not understand anything anymore and wishes he could go home."

"I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist; my novel and 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, and, for them, my corpus of writing is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an investigation and presentation, analysis and response and personal history. My audience will always be limited to those people."

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

"Fully absorbed in the peculiar text he had become totally oblivious to the noises and movements around him; all that existed for him now was the printed page held motionless before his intense scrutiny."

"The hopes of the woolen industry are threadbare."

"He flushes at his presence in a comfort station."

"I am not in a position to enjoy sexual relations."

"The highway construction truck tore up the street at forty miles an hour."

"The vidphone company let me off the hook."

"The representative of the drayage firm failed to move me."

"The book business is hidebound."

"You're a goldmine of misinformation."

"The merest presence of life, even the smallest possible quantity of volition, desire and intent was enough to reverse the process by which the eternal landscape of hell made itself known."

"This one fact alone, Rachmael reflected, should have frightened the rational citizen. But— The people did not know. The media had not reported it."

"If you are wise, Matson said to himself grimly, you never take one-way trips. Anywhere. Even to Boise, Idaho...even across the street. Be certain, when you start, that you can scramble back."

"Too bad, Matson thought archly, that George Hoffman didn't discover more planets in more star systems habitable by us, the frail needs of living, sentient, mentating biochemical upright bipeds which we humans are."

"That's the trouble with living in a police state, he said to himself; you think—you imagine—the police are behind everything. You get paranoid and think they're beaming information to you in your sleep, to subliminally control you. Actually the police wouldn't do that. The police are our friends. Or was that idea beamed to me subliminally? he wondered suddenly. “The police are our friends.” The hell they are!"

"Madness, like small fish, runs in hosts, in vast numbers of instances."

"I realized, then, that I had stood without intending to. Flight reaction, I said to myself. Instinctive. Upon experiencing close adversaries. The lizard part of the brain."

"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."

"Barefoot conducts his seminars on his houseboat in Sausalito. It costs a hundred dollars to find out why we are on this Earth. You also get a sandwich, but I wasn't hungry that day. John Lennon had just been killed and I think I know why we are on this Earth; it's to find out that what you love the most will be taken away from you, probably due to an error in high places rather than by design."

"They think they are free because they have never been free, and do not know what it means."