Quotes from Only Apparently Real ( 1986 )

The police informally said, "We don't want a crusader here in Marin County. You better move away or you'll get a bullet in your back some night. Or worse."

I was shucked by deadly people playing a deadly game.

PAUL WILLIAMS: As a folk hero, you have to tell me again about how your house was broken into. PHILIP K. DICK: That'll make me a folk hero?

Do you know, they read me that as an accusation, that I was calling the cops too much?

They said, "You know, you ought to buy yourself a gun. We're not going to do anything to help you. We haven't got time to come out. If you were to call about something, our man might be somewhere else." I says, "Your man!" I says, "What am I calling, a plumbing firm?"

…you know how many cancelled checks you acquire in twenty-one years…

There were so many feuds going on in my circle that my friends who looked at it (the break-in) thought it was other friends of mine who had done it

"Okay, well, what kind of thing do you write?" "Fiction, novels. Science fiction." Well, I'll tell you what I would say. I would say your house was hit because you wrote something that was true and you didn't realise it."

"Well, how are you going to know? They obviously didn't find anything; or else if they had you'd have been disappeared fast."

"How in the hell would you ever know, see, if it was fiction?"

"They don't understand you, that you're not an evil person…However, they won't arrest you now…but you won't get your stuff back."

…I'm sure within my circle there was at least one agent provocateur.

PKD: [mock menacing voice] Can't you see I'm trying to be evasive, dear? Don't help me when I'm being evasive, I don't need help. TESSA DICK: He's good at that. He's excellent at being evasive. I say, "Phil, what time is it?" and he says, "Well, um…" PKD: "Could I have a moment to think?"

Well, I mean that at about nineteen, um, I was unable to continue doing what I was doing, because I really unconsciously didn't want to do it.

Yeah, I had a whole bunch of courses that were just so much birdshit, that didn't make any sense at all, and I foresaw in the deep recesses of my mind years and years and years of learning to distinguish one paramecium from another, and then trying to go out in the world and cope with reality on the basis of this kind of jive.

PW: You were ahead of your time. That was quite fashionable by the time I got to college. PKD: Yeah, I know. Somebody said that to me. PW: We called it "dropping out". PKD: Yeah, well, at the time I called it "screwing up".

So he's an usher in a theatre. That's what he got out of years and years of college.

I had too weak an ego to suppress the unconscious pressures.

Because I didn't finish college. I'm very - am I a bad person?

I found that I couldn't go into a class and listen to discourses on Locke and Mill and Hobbes, but I could read the books.

I bought a house, I was married, and I felt I should be leaving in the morning and going to work like everybody else. My unconscious just saturated me with anxiety when I got there, to the record store, and I couldn't comprehend why. And I started to faint

…your conscious attitude is formed along restrictive lines…your consciousness is built up on introjected moral values that authority figures have deliberately laid on you.

The unconcscious relates to the entire world, the whole panoply of the universe. It learns from birds, it learns from ads it sees, it learns from television commercials, it learns from everything at once, not just from a few narrow authority figures, parental figures. You see what I mean?

Like, my mother built up my consciousness, my entire world of experience built up my unconsciousness. Now which would you rather go on, your mother or the entire rest of the world?

PKD: I get very mad when I think about my dead sister. PW: Really? PKD: That she died of neglect and starvation. Injury, neglect, and starvation.

How does my mother expect me to feel about that? "Gosh, mom! Jeepers." Something like that? See. I mean, you know, my mother says, "And, oh, we also burned her severely with the hot-water bottle, so it doesn't matter if she died, she would have been crippled anyway."

PKD: I was ceasing to, quote, cope adequately with my responsibilities- PW: As defined by your wife. PKD: As defined by my wife.

I could never mock my characters, for screwing up especially.

see, these people are no longer freaks to me, I mean in the sense of being incompetent and fucking up their lives. Because I had completely fucked up my life, I was completely incompetent, and I loved my characters for their incompetence, you see? I could never write down to my characters. Also it made me need my characters more, as compatriots, friends, cohorts…

PW: How come you've never written a book that's really long? I mean, of the ones you've published, anyway. PKD: Fatigue. [pause] Well, for one thing, I don't make adequate notes. After a certain time I start getting confused. I mean, that to carry it in your head, that's about as far as I can carry it.

…my novels are my make-believe world, and they're full of my friends.

…I am building a universe - this is why, like Ursula said, all my books are really one book. Or something like that. Okay. Now, that's not true, but it is true.

If I were given all eternity, I would create an entire universe this way, eventually. Given enough time.

I found in fact dream after dream that I had were scenes from Ubik. But it makes me wonder, you know, are these characters really real? Do I think I invent them, but in actual fact I am merely picking them up from somewhere?

PW: Somebody was reading a science-fiction book at the front desk at a building a friend of mine manages, a dormitory for medical students, and like twelve people stopped by the desk in the next hour and said, "Oh, you're reading a Phil Dick book," and wanted to start conversations about it. PKD: [muttering] It's the end of the world…this was prophesied in Revelation, along with the nine-headed beast…

…the thing that I've felt, Paul, is that problems are multipersonal, they involve us all, there's no such thing as a private problem.

If I could only look down from a satellite, I would see all the world, everybody, getting up, to some extent, in some analogous way, falling over a chair, and breaking somehting.

It's a goddam shame those idiots out there won't find you, but I bet their unborn kids will. [ James Tiptree, Jr., in a letter to PKD, 1969 ]

PW: Why did you start writing science fiction? PKD: I don't know. I had ideas that could not be expressed any other way.

He was a multifaceted and educated, brilliant and humane person (Tony Boucher, who bought PKD's first short story Roog). A fat lot of good it did him, too.

You know, the greatest incentive to write is that you can't figure out the universe. And you keep trying to do it by writing about it. You can coerce it into making sense by writing a book that makes sense, but what happens is, your books don't make any sense either.

That was another thing, is my friend jim Pike croaked, at the same goddamn practically time! Before A Maze of Death came out, you know. Another ardent religious person. You got two, my two religious friends die within a year or so of each other.

Thank God. My mind is more important than my possessions.

In the early Sixties I did write a novel about a phony war between the United States and Russia that's carried out with the sole purpose of keeping the citizens of those countries underground, while the leaders live in palatial splendour above ground. Now maybe certain people thought this was too close to the truth…

TESSA DICK: Well, when he wrote "A Little Something for Us Tempunauts," when he finished it, he got up from the typing chair and passed out, right on the floor. PKD: [defensively] Well, I had pneumonia, though, see.

PW: When did you start taking them? PKD: Well…in the Fifties. PW: So really early on in your writing career. PKD: Yeah. Um, by the time I wrote Eye In The Sky. And I attributed my speed of writing, my rapidity, and my high productivity, and my pushing myself, to the amphetamines. And then I find now that I do exactly the same.

…they discovered something odd about me, and that was that when I took amphetamines my liver detoxified them and excreted them through the urine, or something like that. Anyway they never reached my brain, they said; the blood tests show they never entered my bloodstream, or anyway never reached the neural tissue. And they said that they thought that I took them for psychological reasons.

My liver identified them as toxins, and simply excreted them. And the doctors said that also explained why it didn't matter how many I took. And I said, "Well, that explains why I like to take some in order to go to sleep at night."

It's obvious that my system generates the conditions necessary, that - what we're talking about here, really, which I didn't realise, is a work habit. It's a way of producing a novel. That I don't make notes; and if I don't make notes, if I do a little each day, I'm gonna forget the continuity, I'm not gonna be able to pick it up again. And that the only way I can really do it is just to continue to do it until it's done.

She was an awfully pretty girl, and I just sat and rapped with her and showed her the book ( The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch ) and went on and on and on. Which is what I normally do anyway.

I was very proud of my liver, and I frequently referred to it as the finest part of me, my brain coming in a bad second.

When things got really bad, miserable and wretched, you know, or I got really frightened, I began to blank out, retrospectively.

PW: Do you subscribe to the theory that the more aware we are of the nature of the world, both socially and whatever, emotionally, the more subject we are to this kind of experience? PKD: You mean the fears, or what? PW: The fears, yeah, the - PKD: Traumas> Up to a point. Then… It's like a journey. Halfway through the journey there's a lot of trauma and a lot of tension. But if you pursue it all the way to the end, you come out where it's very… peaceful. If you just keep on, if you don't bog down halfway. If you have the courage to continue on.

You've got three possibilities. It (the universe) is either uninterested or… You've got three possibilities. It is either malicious; or it is completely uninterested and cold, in the sense of it doesn't care, you get ground up in the machinery and it doesn’t notice you; or that it actually has a certain concern for you, and will do - make efforts, if you will only notice its proferring of help, but you must notice its proferring of help.

But the thoughts in Phil's mind seem to have a life of their own…

He tends to be read as he wrote: in large doses.

Readers immerse themselves in Philip K. Dick's world, and in many cases are never the same again.

I didn't really groove with the universe.

Now, I had a lot of fears that the universe would discover just how different I was from it. My only suspiciion about it was that it would find out the truth about me, and its reaction would be perfectly normal: It would get me.

PKD: I feel that I'm always in the public eye, that I have no privacy, there is no such thing as privacy. I want to lay an idea on you, man. There are no privacies versus publixes any more. PW: There are no secrets. PKD: There are no private lives.

…one of the biggest transformations we have seen in human life in our society is the diminution of the sphere of the private.

They're living like our ancestors did. I mean, the hardware is in the future, the scenery's in the future, but the situations are really from the past.

PKD: Please don't continually say I'm paranoid. PW: Why? PKD: It makes me paranoid…

The way I feel is that the universe itself is actually alive, and we're in it as part of it.