Blog

Tag: authors

  • October 1st, 2012 12:08pm


    thisistheverge:

    More human than human: how Philip K. Dick can change your life

    Jesse Hicks talks to Jonathan Lethem, John Alan Simon, and other ‘Dickheads’ about PKD’s enduring legacy.

    In Dick’s worlds, people could be shits and robots could be more human than human. It all came down to whether they could find within themselves a genuine sense of fellow-feeling. This aligned him less with his sci-fi contemporaries than with authors whose work proposed a strong moral philosophy, such as Leo Tolstoy and, a generation after Dick, David Foster Wallace.

  • September 30th, 2012 2:52pm

    Well, the idea of a single protagonist, I never could understand too well. What I’ve felt is that problems are multi-personal, they involve us all, there’s no such thing as a private problem…it’s only a form of ignorance. When I wake up in the morning, and I fall over the chair and break my nose, and I’m broke, and my wife’s left me – it’s my ignorance that makes me thing I’m an entire universe and that these miseries are my own and they’re not affecting the rest of the world. If I could only look down from a satellite, I would see all the world, everybody getting up and, in some analogous way, falling over a chair and breaking something..

    — Philip K. Dick

  • September 30th, 2012 2:16am

    Now, I don’t know how deeply to go into this, in this letter. The intuitive – I might say, gestating method by which I operate has a tendency to cause me to ‘see’ the whole thing at once…Mozart operated this way. The problem for him was simply to get it down. If he lived long enough, he did so; if not, then not. In other words, according to me (but not according to you people) my work consists of getting down that which exists in my mind; my method up to now has been to develop notes of progressively greater completeness. If I believed that the first jotting-down actually carried the whole idea, I would be a poet, not a novelist; I believe that it takes about 60,000 words for me to put down my original idea in its absolute entirety.

    — Philip K. Dick (in a letter to Eleanor Dimoff about his view on writing. Taken from Paul Williams’ introduction to “Confessions of a Crap Artist”)

  • September 18th, 2012 6:45pm

    It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all of the living and the dead.

    — James Joyce – “The Dead” Dubliners.