Philip Kindred Dick
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Philip K. Dick, born in 1928 in Chicago, wrote over 40 novels including Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and The Man in the High Castle, for which he won the Hugo Award. He died in 1982 at age 53 from heart failure, shortly before the release of Blade Runner. His works have been adapted into films grossing over $1 billion by 2009.
Names, aliases, and relatives of Philip K. Dick — birth name, kin, and personal ties.
Philip K. Dick by the numbers — life, work, and family.
Philip K. Dick — early life, career, personal life, and legacy.
A twin sister died less than eight weeks after their birth in Chicago in December 1928, an event that haunted Philip K. Dick throughout his life. His parents divorced soon after, and he moved with his mother to Berkeley, California. He attended Berkeley High School where he was a classmate of future writer Ursula K. Le Guin, though they did not know each other. He briefly attended the University of California, Berkeley but did not graduate.
Philip K. Dick sold his first story, Roog, in 1952 and published his first novel, Solar Lottery, in 1955. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he wrote nearly a hundred short stories and over twenty novels, including Time Out of Joint and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. His 1963 novel The Man in the High Castle won the Hugo Award for Best Novel. In 1968 he wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which later became the film Blade Runner. Dick’s heavy amphetamine use in the early 1970s allowed him to write up to 68 pages a day, but also sidetracked his career. In 1974 he had a profound religious experience that he believed was a visitation from God, influencing his later novels such as Valis. He won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said in 1975. Despite critical acclaim, Dick struggled financially, often relying on advances to make ends meet. He died of heart failure in 1982 at age 53, shortly after receiving a payment for the film rights to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.
Philip K. Dick was married five times: to Jeanette Marlin in 1948, Kleo Apostolides from 1950 to 1958, Anne Williams Rubinstein from 1958 to 1964, Nancy Hackett from 1966 to 1973, and Tessa Busby from 1973 to 1978. He had three children: Isa Dick Hackett, Laura Leslie, and Christopher Dick. His twin sister Jane died in infancy, a loss that affected him. Dick’s personal life was often turbulent, marked by financial struggles and substance abuse.
Philip K. Dick’s works have been adapted into major films, including Blade Runner 1982, Total Recall 1990, Minority Report 2002, and A Scanner Darkly 2006. By 2009, these films had grossed over $1 billion. He was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. Dick mentored authors Tim Powers, James Blaylock, and K.W. Jeter, who helped create the steampunk genre. An android with Dick’s likeness was built in 2005 but lost on an airline flight.
Browse the complete filmography of Philip K. Dick — every film, TV show, and documentary credit, ranked by popularity.
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Philip K. Dick's bibliography — every authored, edited, and co-written book, ranked by edition count.
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A wall of memorable lines from Philip K. Dick — lyrics, interviews, and off-the-cuff remarks captured over a lifetime.
Reality Is That Which, When You Stop Believing in It, Doesn’t Go Away.
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.
I’m an Obsessive Writer and If I Don’t Get Writer’s Block I’d Overload, Short Circuit and Blow My Brain Out Right Away.
Sometimes to Go Insane Is an Appropriate Response to the World.
If You Want to Get Well, You’re Going to Have to Stop Trying to Help People.
The Most Dangerous Kind of Person… Is One Who Is Afraid of His Own Shadow.
What a Tragic Realm This Is, He Reflected. Those Down Here Are Prisoners, and the Ultimate Tragedy Is That They Don’t Know It; They Think They Are Free Because They Have Never Been Free, and Do Not Understand What It Means.
Exactly What the Powers of Hell Feed On: the Best Instincts in Man.
When I Was a Child, I Thought as a Child. but Now I Have Put Away Childish Things…. I Must Be Scientific.
For Every Person a Sentence, a Series of Words, Exists That Can Destroy Them. There Also Exists a Series of Words That Can Heal Them. You May Not Get the Second, but You Can Be Sure of Getting the First.
There Should Be a Clause That If You Find God You Get to Keep Him.
He Was Becoming an Anachronism, and the Universe Has a Habit of Deleting Anachronisms.
The Authorities Had Become as Psychotic as They People They Hunted. the Authorities Wanted to Lock up Anyone Who Wasn’t a Clone of the Establishment. the Authorities Were Full of Hate.
There Is No Route Out of the Maze. the Maze Shifts as You Move Through It, Because It Is Alive.
It Horrified Him, This Thought: the Ancient Gigantic Cannibal near Man Flourishing Now, Ruling the World Once More. We Spent a Million Years Escaping Him, Frink Thought, and Now He’s Back. and Not Merely as the Adversary . . . but as the Master.
You Know the Old Brownshirt Term for People Who Spin Philosophy? Eierkopf. Egghead. Because the Big Double Domed Empty Heads Break so Easily . . . in the Street Brawls
The Nazis Have No Sense of Humor, so Why Should They Want Television? Anyhow, They Killed Most of the Really Great Comedians.
And Yet, Even If One Person Finds His Way … That Means There Is a Way. Even If I Personally Fail to Reach It.
Even If All Life on Our Planet Is Destroyed, There Must Be Other Life Somewhere Which We Know Nothing Of. It Is Impossible That Ours Is the Only World; There Must Be World After World Unseen by Us, in Some Region or Dimension That We Simply Do Not Perceive
They’re Not Idealists Like Joe and Me; They’re Cynics with Utter Faith. It’s a Sort of Brain Defect, Like a Lobotomy That
Amazing, the Power of Fiction, Even Cheap Popular Fiction, to Evoke. No Wonder It’s Banned Within Reich Territory
They Want to Be the Agents, Not the Victims, of History. They Identify with God’s Power and Believe They Are Godlike. That Is Their Basic Madness. They Are Overcome by Some Archetype; Their Egos Have Expanded Psychotically so That They Cannot Tell Where They Begin and the Godhead Leaves Off. It Is Not Hubris, Not Pride; It Is Inflation of the Ego to Its Ultimate Confusion Between Him Who Worships and That Which Is Worshiped. Man Has Not Eaten God; God Has Eaten Man.What They Do Not Comprehend Is Man’s Helplessness. I Am Weak, Small, of No Consequence to the Universe. It Does Not Notice Me; I Live on Unseen. but Why Is That Bad? Isn’t It Better That Way? Whom the Gods Notice They Destroy. Be Small…and You Will Escape the Jealousy of the Great.
Don’t Make Fun of Him, I Said. This Is Important to Him.
Fat, According to Kevin, Was Horny.
There Is an Intimate Relationship Between What Is Wise and What Exists…
You Always Need the Saviour Now. Later Is Always Too Late.
It Was a Time of Our Lives We Preferred to Forget About. Too Many Bad Memories, Too Many Dreams Gone Down the Tubes.
I’d Write a Book About It If I Thought Anyone Would Believe People Could Be as Irrational as We Are. They Would Now, After Those 900 People at Jonestown…
Evil Serves Good, Despite Its Cunning.
When You’re Mentally Ill, You Learn to Keep Quiet…
There’s a Line in the I Ching: Always Sick but Never Dies. That Describes My Friend.
It Is a Characteristic of the Mentally Ill to Despise Those Who Try to Help Them and Love Those Who Connive Against Them.
The Nurses Are Dumb, They Have Enough Trouble Working Out Which Patient Is Which and Finding Their Little Paper Cups. This Is Because Ward Populations Are Constantly Changing. New People Arrive and Old People Get Discharged.
Heraclitus: Time Is a Child at Play. This Is a Terrible Thought, a Child Playing with All Life in the Universe.
That’s the Existentialist Position: We Are What We Do, Not We Are What We Think.
As with Anaxamander, Time Is a Name for God…
When Someone Else Espouses the Same Thing You Believe, You Can Identify It as Gibberish.
Kevin Had No Viable Alternative to Mental Illness; His Cynical Grin Was the Grin of Death.
We Enjoyed Baiting Fat into Theological Disputation, Because He Always Got Angry.
The Root of the Word Idiot Is the Word Private…
The Universe and the Mind Behind It Are Insane. Therefore to Be in Touch with Reality Is to Be in Touch with the Insane.
Little-known facts about Philip K. Dick — origins, oddities, and behind-the-scenes details from a public life.
Many of his works were adapted by Hollywood, but Dick had long passed away when the royalties started coming in. He had poorly managed his business affairs and so saw few royalties from his novels and short stories, living most of his life in relative poverty. A large payment for the rights to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? gave him financial freedom for the first time, but he died shortly after the release of Blade Runner and never enjoyed the money from that or later adaptations.
Before his death, Dick saw about 20 minutes of Blade Runner 1982 with mostly-completed special effects shots and sound effects but no music. He left the screening pleasantly stunned after having been cynical about the film beforehand.
Dick is one of the most adapted novelists in Hollywood, though he detested Hollywood and initially had no interest in film adaptations of his work.
By 2009, films based on Philip K. Dick’s writing had accumulated a total revenue of over US $1 billion.
Philip K. Dick graduated from Berkeley High School in 1947 alongside future science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, but they did not know each other.
Dick got the idea for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? when he found an Auschwitz Nazi officer’s diary in his university’s library. The entry read The screaming of children keeps me awake, leading Dick to decide the man had become an android.
He is the father of producers Isa Dick Hackett, Christopher Dick, and Laura Leslie, who co-founded Electric Shepherd Productions to steward his literary estate.
The story Minority Report was originally adapted as a sequel to Total Recall 1990 by writers Ronald Shusett and Gary Goldman, later joined by Robert Goethals. The setting was changed to Mars with the Precogs as mutated humans. The project fell apart, and the script was eventually rewritten from scratch by Jon Cohen in 1997.
In 2005, scientists created an android with a head resembling Philip K. Dick that could respond to questions appropriately. When introduced to his daughter Isa, the android launched into a tirade denouncing her mother, Nancy Hackett. The android’s head was later lost during an airline flight to Santa Ana, California, where Dick died.
Dick was a heavy user of amphetamines in the early 1970s, which he said enabled him to produce 68 final pages of copy per day.
He is buried in Riverside Cemetery, Fort Morgan, Morgan County, Colorado, USA: Section K, block 1, lot 56.
Dick was a long-time mentor and friend of Tim Powers, James Blaylock, and K.W. Jeter, science fiction authors who co-founded the steampunk genre.
Several of his stories involve chasing or running, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, Impostor, and Minority Report.
A biography of Dick appears in The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, Volume One, 1981-1985, pages 231-233.
In a 1977 French television interview, Dick revealed he had been allowed access to FBI and CIA files that had been monitoring his movements.
Christopher Hitchens’ column in The Nation was called Minority Report.
Quick answers to the questions readers ask most about Philip K. Dick.
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