Philip K. Dick on Truth

"I’ve always had this funny feeling about reality. It just seems very feeble to me sometimes. It doesn’t seem to have the substantiality that it’s suppose to have."

"Any given man sees only a tiny portion of the total truth, and very often, in fact almost...perpetually, he deliberately deceives himself about that precious little fragment as well."

"Crazy Sane -- Music video tribute to Philip K. Dick by band "True to the Universe"

"It takes a certain amount of courage, he thought, to face yourself and say with candor, I’m rotten. I’ve done evil and I will again. It was no accident; it emanated from the true, authentic me."

"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."

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

"'“Everything is true”, he said. “Everything anybody has ever thought."

"Probably she should not have gotten away with it for as long as she had...but sometime, he had often thought, the retribution will come: reality denied comes back to haunt."

"It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane."

"I will never fully understand; that is the nature of such creatures. Or is this Inner Truth now, this that is happening to me? I will wait. I will see. Which it is. Perhaps it is both."

"A psychologist said, “They used to talk about seeing only ‘reflections’ of reality. Not reality itself. The main thing wrong with a reflection is not that it isn’t real, but that it’s reversed."

"There is evil! It's actual, like cement."

"Ramp hawkers were peddling “methods,” low priced sure-fire theories guaranteed to predict bottle twitches and beat the whole Minimax game. The hawkers were ignored by the hurrying throngs of people; anybody with a genuine system of prediction would be using it, not selling it."

"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."