http://speechification.com/2009/09/17/c ... ap-artist/
Pure legend.
I recommend his work to everyone with half a brain
. specifically VALIS and Do android dream of electric sheep? aka "Blade Runner"Here is some of his quotes/interview excerpts to read whenever you get around to it.
A Scanner Darkly is a roman à clef (a fictionalized account of real events) based on Dick's experiences in the 1970s drug culture. Dick said in an interview, "Everything in A Scanner Darkly I actually saw."[5]
Between mid-1970 (when his fourth wife Nancy left him) and mid-1972 (when he entered the X-Kalay program; see below) Dick lived semi-communally with a rotating group of mostly teenage drug users at his home in Marin County. Dick explained, "[M]y wife Nancy left me in 1970 ... I got mixed up with a lot of street people, just to have somebody to fill the house. She left me with a four bedroom, two-bathroom house and nobody living in it but me. So I just filled it with street people and I got mixed up with a lot of people who were into drugs."[5]
During this period, the author ceased writing completely and became fully dependent upon amphetamines, which he had been using intermittently for many years. "I did take amphetamines for years in order to be able to — I was able to produce 68 final pages of copy a day," Dick said.
Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.
These creatures are among us, although morphologically they do not differ from us; we must not posit a difference of essence, but a difference of behavior. In my science fiction I write about about them constantly. Sometimes they themselves do not know they are androids. Like Rachel Rosen, they can be pretty but somehow lack something; or, like Pris in We Can Build You, they can be absolutely born of a human womb and even design androids - the Abraham Lincoln one in that book - and themselves be without warmth; they then fall within the clinical entity "schizoid," which means lacking proper feeling. I am sure we mean the same thing here, with the emphasis on the word "thing." 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 the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne's theorem that "No man is an island," but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man.
People just have no criterion left to evaluate the importance of things. I think the only thing that would really affect people would be the announcement that the world was going to be blown up by the hydrogen bomb. I think that would really affect people. I think they would react to that. But outside of that, I don't think they would react to anything. "Peking has been wiped out by an earthquake, and the RTD -- the bus strike is still on." And some guy says, "Damnit! I'll have to walk to work!"
It is amazing that when someone else spouts the nonsense you yourself believe you can readily perceive it as nonsense.
NY Times reviewer wrote:To call Philip K. Dick ... a science-fiction writer is to the underscore the inadequacy of the label. ... It would be more accurate to call him one of the most valiant psychological explorers of the 20th century.
and FYI...in case you have read the madness that is VALIS, they are making it into a a movie apparently...somehow...someway
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