One of these days, Joe said wrathfully, people like me will rise up and overthrow you, and the end of tyranny by the homeostatic machine will have arrived. The day of human values and compassion and s...
One of the most effective forms of industrial or military sabotage limits itself to damage that can never be thoroughly proven - or even proven at all - to be anything deliberate. It is like an invisi...
Never walk over a writer, I said to myself, unless you're positive he can't rise us behind you. If you're going to burn him, make sure he's dead. Because if he's alive, he will talk: talk in written f...
Italy being a traitor? His voice grated. The Duce—he was a clown; we all know that.
It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity.
I'm tired and I want to rest; I want to get out of this and go lie down somewhere, off where it's dark and no one speaks. Forever.
I resemble that worm which crawls through dust,Lives in the dust, eats dustUntil a passerby's foot crushes it.
I chose God over the material universe.
I became educated to the fact that the greatest pain does not come zooming down from a distant planet, but from the depths of the heart. Of course, both could happen; your wife and child could leave y...
I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, then do as I tell t...
He fixed things—clocks, refrigerators, vidsenders and destinies.
He felt the pressure of her love as she squeezed his fingers, and then there was nothing. Except the pain. But nothing else, no Heather, no hospital, no staff men, no light. And no sound. It was an et...
From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt's money-gulping door.I'll sue you, the door said as the fi...
Despair like that, about total reality, is self-perpetuating.
And yet now and then he let himself steal a glance at her. Lovely dark colors of her skin, hair, and eyes. We are half-baked compared to them. Allowed out of the kiln before we were fully done. The ol...
#36:...Something has happened to our intelligence. My reasoning is this: arrangements of part of the Brain is a language. We are parts of the Brain; therefore, we are language. Why, then, do we not kn...
...hence the very best science fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create - and enjoy it; joy is the essential and final ingredient of science fi...
When I was a child, I thought as a child. But now I have put away childish things.
Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.
—Si es amor por una mujer o una imitación androide, es sexo. Despierte y cuestióneselo, Deckard. Quería acostarse con un androide femenino, nada más y nada menos.