Quotes from Selected Letters, 1975 - 1976 ( 1992 )

Every time I try to care about a spiritual matter I have to bust my ass earning more money.

. . .I hadn't realised before how fucking dumb and dull and futile and empty middle class life is. I have gone from the gutter (circa 1971) to the plastic container. As always, I got it wrong once again.

We are humans in a cruel landscape which does not want us. We have lost our home.

What I feel is a longing, a nagging need for something other than what is, and also a sense that what is somehow merely fills in to obscure the truth that this is wrong, all this. We don't belong here.

We must wake up to the meaning of our alienation. . .

If this is all a game and there is something else, since the game is lousy and drecky then it also follows although less evidently that the something else must be of true value, true good.

We do evil to obtain dogshit. . .

For what it's worth, God drives a lot better than I do. Which seems reasonable.

Nobody ever guessed that God would be reborn in the form of a building. This is to shag it past the Prince of This World. I think it is a neat-o plan.

. . .if it's out national policy to steal the oil in the first place from the Arabs, what about when you and I can't afford to buy it at the pumps?

What do I know? What does any writer know?

I lived in fear so long. I was told in late 1971 that I would never live to reach Canada. . .I was told, "Someone impersonating you will appear in your place. And we will complete your unfinished works."

We accept his work, his offerings, his help; but him we kick away. He could reveal himself, but he would then spoil our illusion of a beautiful god. But he doesn't look evil like Satan; just homely. Unworthy. Also, although he has vast creative and building power, and judgement, he is not clever. He is not a bright god. Often he is too dumb to know when he's being teased or insulted; it takes physical pain, rather than mere scorn, to register.

One day the contents of my mind moved faster and faster until they ceased being concepts and became percepts.

Multiple incorrectness, however frequently ratified, does not create accuracy, does it not?

. . .many of the changes or transformations taking place in me, which I assign to the presence of the bioplasmic life form of which I spoke, also took place in our cat. . .

We are, in a way, passing through a Cosmic Car-Wash, and a thousand brushes and brooms and vacuum cleaners are scrubbing us, refining us and purifying us, and, very important, teaching us.

It is important that you understand that you are dealing with a mad genius when you deal with me (oh, you knew that already).

. . .the question, "What is reality?" is falsely asked, and should go: "What are reality?"

To reinvent or rediscover something which had been ruled nonexistent in the first place. . .that is the secret weapon of truth: it can't be suppressed, because of its nature; if it could be, it would only be opinion.

The time bomb of awakening is already ticking away; we shall wake up, are doing so now.

In our own current view we are forced to admit that if time can flow only forward, never in reverse, then it lacks the property of symmetry, which other forces in the universe seem to have; therefore, perhaps - but not likely - our view of time is incomplete.

There is one born every half-second, now. One guileless fool. And at the other end of the corridor, the con-artist waits. He wears many hats. . .Many hats. And most of those hats are respectable.

Why would God take his Sole Son, whom He loved, and send Him here?

When something happens to you you should at least be able to spell it.

I wish doing the Right Thing and Getting What Your Heart Loves and Yearns For were the same. If King Solomon were here to decide he would have thought it over and finally shaken his head and uttered: "Fuck it."

THE PENULTIMATE TRUTH might make one hell of a film and a topical one at that.

Every novel of mine is at least two novels superimposed.

I did something I never did before: I commanded the entity to show itself to me - the entity which has been guiding me internally since March. A sort of dream-like period passed then, of hypnagogic images of underwater cities, very nice, and then a stark single horrifying scene, inert but not still: a man lay dead, on his face, in a living room between the coffee table and the couch.

"Who or what is was Christ?" Tessa asked me. "The style we are drawn in, " I said.

. . .the best thing a child's book can do is teach what the child may be and do.

The trouble with Jesus is that he isn't musical.

. . .we are probably going to get more publicity out of this hit on my house than there is sea water in the Atlantic.

. . .all my writing is done at the typewriter, which takes both hands and hence involves bilateral brain parity; therefore, writing done on the typewriter is, neurologically speaking, not the same as oral speech which requires only the left. I have a strange feeling that this is important, and would explain why some people can write well but not speak well and vice versa.

. . .Victoria Principal has a voice like a chicken. . .Is this actionable, what I said there?

You see, if one starts with music, the chanted drama of Dionysian tragedy, then by progressing methodically one finally arrives at the stunning realisation that SCIENCE AND SANITY, i.e. General Semantics, is totally insane.

I just wrote Ornstein about certain hypnagogic information input I've experienced which suggest the reality of Tielhard's noosphere; I may inadvertently have substantiated its reality.

The coercive enforcement of mere power, the ability to compel men, to reify them - this all constitutes qualities of Winter and is passing.

The symbol of half-life in UBIK must be viewed as an accurate dramatic representation of our true state of Being: we are only half alive, or slumbering in our icy coffins, severally, and individually as shown in the novel.

. . .his job requires him to fake what he is, to be inauthentic inasmuch as he fronts for the government re the recording artists he deals with. This has produced a schism within him. There can be others, but basically he leads a typically modern inauthentic schismatic existence - note existence, not life. There is no growth, just the constant revolution of the wheel of lineal time which accumulates only dust.

. . .psychedelic colour is the life of the world, the language in which the creator speaks to us.

That is the future, a bunch of patterns being fed to us as we stand around within the space-time cube.

Maybe somewhere God has a set of headphones on and is listening to our civilisation. . .

. . .when I as an individual die, it is as if a cell in my body died; the organism (the barrel plus barrel-pusher) goes on.

Perhaps we have not truly had a legal government since that day in Dallas, and those dreadful forces of murder and tyranny took over, cloaked in gray fog, to rule over us in the form of secret police, a true police state but masked by the outer garments of legality.

In true thought control, it is not necessary to make you believe what I believe. If I can cause you to see reality as I see it, to experience it as I experience it, then your beliefs and ideas will automatically follow; they will be the same as mine. It is the manipulation of reality (or rather the view of reality) which contains the secret of controlling other minds.

I have 90 copies of CRAP here now, but don't know where you want them signed. Title page? Inside front cover? Please advise.

Someday it will be noted in this country that UBIK contains extraordinarily important new theoretical material having to do with the nature of the universe, and we will all be rich.

The ultimate source of a person's identity has to come out from inside him, and not be ratified of necessity by the words and presence of another. "No man is an island" should be alterd to , "Often a man must exist as an island, and if he cannot, he will die."

There is always too much grief. We must withdraw and survive.

I think I will take up drinking, so as to close down my brain.

Guilt is not a proper handle to control other people with; if I owe it to anyone to get well I owe it to myself - to be free of the burden of the irrational conviction that I have failed everyone and in every area.

In novel after novel I set out to decompose the universe, to make it come apart so as to see what it was made of, or more precisely, what held it together.

Ever since the police lost interest in me there's been nothing to live for.

You cannot vote the largest secret police agency out of existence that now exists anywhere in the world (the CIA).

. . .TV needs all the true life it can get. The next thing you'll be doing - to play it -safe - is tape the entire news in advance instead of doing it live.

Right now I'm waiting to see if FLOW MY TEARS wins the Hugo. The I CHING says it won't.

No one who hasn't seen the ravages of drugs can imagine them. I saw; I can imagine; and evidently I got them down on paper. If I save one single human mind or life with SCANNER I'll be happy.

My therapist has had a difficult time pulling me out of the dreadful space which doing the final on SCANNER has put me in. . .she was going to hospitalise me at one point, to keep me from offing myself. Imagine your own novel having that much effect on you!

It will not be published as a scince-fiction novel. . ."It has too many four-letter words in it. . .and it'd wreck the novel to take them out." You can see. . .how God works it: from the bottom up. Gosh, I could have gotten one of my novels published as non science-fiction years ago if I'd known this.

A lot of the stories which I and other s-f writers write are based on. . .childhood feelings and fears.

We're still sort of kids, we s-f writers.

I think when horror breaks through into the everyday world it is at its worst, don't you?

The alien-as-enemy is a theme much overworked by writers. Perhaps, in truth, they might be god-like, and give us enormous help.

We who have led the hippy life are now obtaining positions of power (I read that somewhere).

I told, in my speech, of how I saw Chaos or Chance undermining the whole police state which Orwell had predicted. Everyone cheered. They'd (the rulers) just fuck up. The electronic gadgetry would fuck up. It'd all fuck up.

Do you realise it's people like us who are molding the world right now? That's true. I know it. . .They don't know it.

. . .Warner Brothers, at the top department, had p[honed Paul Williams to ask which book of mine would make the best movie. Paul told them MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, MARTIAN TIME-SLIP and THE WORLD JONES MADE.

Time phoned me a couple weeks ago and wanted to interview me, but I had the flu and said no. What I told them though was that Time is too important and I am too puny for them to interview me. That puzzled them and tey argued otherwise. I finally agreed that in fact I was too important and they were too puny.

. . .I write because I enjoy writing, and what is most important is that people should enjoy reading them; inparticular I like it when people get off on humour in my novels. In France, where I am so popular, they don't see the humour at all in any of my stuff, which I think in itself is very funny.

Please let me know if you have anything on this San Diego dig, one way or the other, as it is messing up my head to think of a one-eyed, two-nosed humanoid wandering around this area four million years ago. I just can't take it seriously.

If you do make it out here to Fullerton, you are welcome to stay with me / us (I keep saying me / us because Tessa may have left again by the time you get here; only God knows these things). In any case I'll be here. So will my 4 cats, especially Fat Arnold.

I think I've found a way to bring people back to life. Should I print this information?

A black guy dropped over the other night, a guy whom I hardly knew; I didn't even remember his name. He had come by, he said, for help. One time he had met me and I has given him a book of mine to read (FLOW MY TEARS). "In that book of yours," he said, "my people were legally protected, like the whooping cranes. It meant a lot to me, but I'm confused about the world, now; I don't know what I am any more." I had to tell him I didn't know what I was any more, either. That I was bewildered and anxious, same as him. But we somehow drew strength form each other, and when he left - suddenly, because, as he said, talking such heavy rap was hard on his head - he turned and yelled down the path at me, "You've given me fight power!"

Each day I am more convinced that FLOW MY TEARS, for some eerie reason, accurately depicts the true situation now currentin the U.S., although when I began writing it I thought of it as only nightmare, not fact.

I read the speech over the other night. . .it is sort of nuts, but also thought-provoking. I still stand by what I said, except that such matters, being so difficult to communicate, sound sort of - to be blunt - irrational when set down in black and white.

My psychotherapist, with a furious and grim expression on his face, yelled at me, "You're to draw up a list of your wants, AND I MEAN THAT SERIOUSLY!" I said, "Yessir, yessir," meekly, and have been drawing up my list of wants. One of them is to not have people yell at me to draw up lists.

It's as if the gods were sitting around and having nothing better to so they said, "Let's see old Phil get THIS down on paper." And then revealed all the mysteries of the universe to me and sat back laughing. Gods must have the same kind of sense of humour as cats.

As you know, I won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for TEARS. Time magazine interviewed and photographed me. . .4 days later I was in the Cardiac Unit, and they didn't know if I'd live. I'm not made for the big time.

I was thinking last night, You know, Phil, the worst thing you ever did in your life, your worst mistake, was trying year after year to be a good person. I think now, You don't try to be a good person; you just are what you are and do what you do, and if it's good, okay, and if not, then not, and the hell with it.

Want to hear the story of my life sometime? It'd make a great novel.

. . .what I have most against creed Christianity is its downgrading of intelligence, man's most precious possession.