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Tag: philip k dick

  • January 31st, 2013 11:48pm

    Imagine being sentient but not alive. Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognizing but not being alive. A person can die and still go on.

    — Philip K. Dick – A Scanner Darkly (via bieberssi)

  • November 27th, 2012 11:23am

    Too bad. And Mozart, not long after writing The Magic Flute, had died—in his thirties—of kidney disease. And had been buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave.

    Thinking this, he wondered if Mozart had any intuition that the future did not exist, that he had already used up his little time. Maybe I have too, Rick thought as he watched the rehearsal move along. This rehearsal will end, the performance will end, the singers will die, eventually the last score of the music will be destroyed in one way or another; finally the name “Mozart” will vanish, the dust will have won. If not on this planet then another. We can evade it awhile. As the andys can evade me and exist a finite stretch longer. But I will get them or some other bounty hunter gets them. In a way, he realized, I’m part of the form-destroying process of entropy.

    — Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  -Philip K. Dick (via veloriumcamper)

  • 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”)