Philip K. Dick Quotes

Sucking up to the biggies won't get us anywhere.

Some of us have great original ideas and some of us depend on adaptations.

If you read all the time what other people have done, you will the think the way they thought.

You know how Hollywood is: They just follow suit.

Nothing is more despicable than to reach fame by crawling, position by cringing.

I kept bugging them about making it more upscale, because I felt Abby, through her cleverness and business sense, was a character who would move up. And that's what she did.

It's the nature of Hollywood that there are the people in power and the people who tell them what they want them to hear.

We live in a funny time. If you don't go corporate, you can't compete. You're relegated as irrelevant. People used to admire that.

He who resolves never to ransack any mind but his own, will be soon reduced, from mere barrenness, to the poorest of all imitations; he will be obliged to imitate himself, and to repeat what he has before often repeated.

There is more opportunity for a nobody to become a somebody in Washington than in the whirl-pool of New York.

What's wrong with social climbing? What's wrong with trying to improve your lot in life? And if you do, what happens if your family doesn't? Is that betraying your roots? Are you being dishonest? I had a really good job, and it paid really well. Am I supposed to quit it out of loyalty to my parents?

I suppose, unconsciously, I used all my wives to further my journey up the ladder.

Pavel Durov only knows how to copy great products like Facebook and 'WhatsApp'; he never had and will never have original ideas.

I have watched people around members of the royal family for a long time now, and something very strange happens to them. They turn into sycophants.

Nobody's unique. Everybody copies off of each other. Everybody wears the same type of stuff. Nobody's an individual anymore.

You must ingratiate yourself with those who can help you. Flatter them to their faces. Praise them to others who will carry your words back to them.

Every age might perhaps produce one or two geniuses, if they were not sunk under the censure and obloquy of plodding, servile, imitating pedants.

Lines slip easily down the accustomed grooves. The old designs are copied so glibly that we are half inclined to think them original, save for that very glibness.

If knowing yourself and being yourself were as easy to do as to talk about, there wouldn't be nearly so many people walking around in borrowed postures, spouting secondhand ideas, trying desperately to fit in rather than to stand out.

Ambitious men spend their youth in rendering themselves worthy of patronage; it is their great mistake. While the foolish creatures are laying in stores of knowledge and energy, so that they shall not sink under the weight of responsible posts that recede from them, schemers come and go who are wealthy in words and destitute of ideas, astonish the ignorant, and creep into the confidence of those who have a little knowledge.

People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular- and too lazy to think of anything better.

After watching the State of the Union address the other night [1994], I'm reminded of the old adage that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Only in this case, it's not flattery, but grand larceny: the intellectual theft of ideas that you and I recognize as our own. Speech delivery counts for little on the world stage unless you have convictions, and, yes, the vision to see beyond the front row seats.

How little inventiveness there is in man, Grave copier of copies.

Imitators are a slavish herd and fools in my opinion.