The Dick Simulacrum

Having read pretty much the entire ouvre of Philip K. Dick as a compulsive reading teenager, I think I can lay claim to the coveted epithet "Dick Head." There are so many wonderful quotes that I could display here, but I shall limit myself to three. The first is one of his most famous.

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
Simple, but brilliant and, from a man so obsessed with exploring the shifting, transitory and subjective nature of reality, remarkably pragmatic.

"The ultimate paranoia is not when everyone is against you, it's when everything is against you. Instead of "My boss is plotting against me", it would be, "My boss' phone is plotting against me".
From a man who believed the the C.I.A. had planted a telepathic bug in his brain, that the Russians had developed a madness ray which they were pointing at the U.S.A. and that a gigantic alien satellite named V.A.L.I.S. (Vast Active Living Intelligence System) fired a pink laser beam into his brain which revealed to him the total sum of knowledge in the universe (anamnesis or "loss of forgetfulness), including the "fact" that we are all still living in the year 0036 A.D. and that everything since that time is an illusion created by the Devil to undermine our faith in the Second Coming - Dick knows a thing or two about paranoia!

"They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed-run over, maimed, destroyed-but they continued to play anyhow....... Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgement. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is "Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying," but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory." (From "A Scanner Darkly.")
Sorry, time to get heavy. One of the most terrifying books I have ever read and one of the most effective anti-drug books ever written. Clearly most of Dick's religious and visionary experiences were pharmacologically induced delusions resulting from drug abuse and A Scanner Darkly was Dick's manifesto rejecting the whole "social error." Honestly, why would anyone want to mess with a substance which distorts the boundary between reality and delusion?