It really seems to me that in the midst of great tragedy, there is always the horrible possibility that something terribly funny will happen.

I believe [with Wigan] that each of us has two minds in one person. There is a host of detail to be marshaled in this case. But we must eventually confront directly the principal resistance...

We didn’t have sense enough to take care of it. Now it’s torn. And the artist is dead.

Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane. Or you are becoming sane, finally.

Do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before...

It isn’t a brute instinct that keeps us restless and dissatisfied. I’ll tell you what it is: it’s the highest goal of man – the need to grow and advance . . . to find...

I have seen myself backward.

It is proper that technically qualified non-lunatics should sit in judgement on lunatics. How could things be otherwise?

We are all insects. Groping towards something terrible or divine-

We’re all dreaming,” Arctor said. If the last to know he’s an addict is the addict, then maybe the last to know when a man means what he says is the man himself, he reflected....

What sort of an imaginary voice is that? I asked myself, suppose Columbus had heard an imaginary voice telling him to sail west. And because of it he had discovered the New World and changed...

Cancer… the process of creation gone wild, I thought.

There, at her console, he dialed 594: pleased acknowledgement of husband’s superior wisdom in all matters

Maybe it could be depression, like you get. I can understand now how you suffer when you’re depressed; I always thought you liked it and I thought you could have snapped yourself out any time,...

every particle being connected with every other; you can’t fart without changing the balance in the universe. It makes living a funny joke with nobody around to laugh.

When do I see a photograph, when a reflection?

The most dangerous kind of person… is one who is afraid of his own shadow.

You mean old books?””Stories written before space travel but about space travel.””How could there have been stories about space travel before –“”The writers,” Pris said, “made it up.

There will come a time when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me’.

No structure, even an artificial one, enjoys the process of entropy. It is the ultimate fate of everything, and everything resists it.

Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. . . If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of...

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...

Because of an imaginary voice, Nicholas had become a whole person; rather than the partial person he had been in Berkeley. If he had remained in Berkeley he would have lived and died a partial...

Amazed, Fat said, “She’s decomposing and yet she’s still giving birth?””Only to monsters,” Dr. Stone said.

They know a million tricks, those novelists. Take Doctor Goebbels; that’s how he started out, writing fiction. Appeals to the base lusts that hide in everyone no matter how respectable on the surface. Yes, the...

There is a line somewhere in Wozzeck that translates out to, roughly, ‘The world is awful.’ Yes, I said to myself as I shot across the Bay Bridge not giving a fuck how fast I...

Fat realized that one of two possibilities existed and only two; either Dr. Stone was totally insane – not just insane but totally so – or else in an artful, professional fashion he had gotten...

Also, I do seem attracted to trash, as if the clue–the clue–lies there. I’m always ferreting out elliptical points, odd angles. What I write doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. There is fun and...

You’re – psychotic. There’s something wrong with you.””I know,” Benteley agreed. “I’m a sick man. And the more I see, the sicker I get. I’m so sick I think everybody else is sick and I’m...

I think Dr. Willis McNelly at the California State University at Fullerton put it best when he said that the true protagonist of an sf story or novel is an idea and not a person....

I should not yield to it, he told himself once again as he walked along carrying the briefcase. Compulsion-obsession-phobia. But he could not free himself. It in my grip, I in its, he thought.

Just tell me why; why the fucking why?” To which the universe would hollowly respond, “My ways cannot be known, oh man.” Which is to say, “My ways do not make sense, nor do the...

Everybody knows that Aristotelian two-value logic is fucked.

Sometimes I think this planet is under a spell,” Elias said. “We are asleep or in a trance, and something causes us to see what it wants us to see and remember and think what...

…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 fiction, the...

But—let me tell you my cat joke. It’s very short and simple. A hostess is giving a dinner party and she’s got a lovely five-pound T-bone steak sitting on the sideboard in the kitchen waiting...

The mentally disturbed do not employ the Principle of Scientific Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of facts. They shoot for the baroque.

It’s easy to win. Anybody can win.

A person’s authentic nature is a series of shifting, variegated planes that establish themselves as he relates to different people; it is created by and appears within the framework of his interpersonal relationships.

you must be an android.

Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.

Well, I hate to admit it, but it is possible that there is (one) such a thing as telepathy and (two) that the CETI project’s idea that we might communicate with extraterrestrial beings via telepathy...

The existence of a majority logically implies a corresponding minority.

We’ll fight back, we’ll fight back, we’ll fight back,” a man near Doctor Stockstill was chanting. Stockstill looked at him in astonishment, wondering who he would fight back against. Things were falling on them; did...

Grief reunites you with what you’ve lost. It’s a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that’s going away. You follow it a far as you can go.But finally,the grief goes away and...

A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about...

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...

Maybe I’ll go where I can see stars, he said to himself as the car gained velocity and altitude; it headed away from San Francisco, toward the uninhabited desolation to the north. To the place...

Pious people spoke to God, and crazy people imagined that God spoke back.

Most of the masses still believe in magic, you know. Spells. Potions. It’s a big business, I am told.