Reality is whatever refuses to go away when I stop believing in it.

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.

The trouble with being educated is that it takes a long time; it uses up the better part of your life and when you are finished what you know is that you would have benefited more by going into banking.

This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance.

It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.

Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.

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 of judgment.

Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.

Reality is whatever refuses to go away when I stop believing in it.

I am a fictionalizing philosopher, not a novelist.

I am basically analytical, not creative; my writing is simply a creative way of handling analysis.

I am one of the elect, one of the few in the know, in the gnosis.

I dreamed: I am the fish whose flesh is eaten, and because I am fat, it is good.

I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards.

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

The Martians are always coming.

The core of my writing is not art but truth.

The universe is information and we are stationary in it, not three dimensional and not in space or time.

We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. I ask, in my writing, 'What is real?' Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms.

When I believe, I am crazy. When I don't believe, I suffer psychotic depression.

Reality denied comes back to haunt.

We are living in a computer programmed reality and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed and some alteration in reality occurs. We have the overwhelming impression that we were reliving the present deja vu.

We live in a society where detachment is almost essential.

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 of judgment.

The existence of a majority logically implies a corresponding minority.

The problem with introspection is that it has no end.

Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane.

He started keeping a journal - had been, in fact, secretly doing so for some time: the furtive act of a deranged person.

Madness has its own dynamism. It just goes on.

Matter is plastic in the face of Mind.

There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive.

We must content ourselves with the mystery, the absurdity, the contradictions, the hostility, but also the generosity that our environment offers us. It's not much, but it's always better than the deadly, defeatist certainty of the paranoid.

Skill is a function of chance. It's an intuitive best-use of chance situations.

No man is infinitely strong; for every creature that runs, flies, hops or crawls there is a terminal nemesis which he will not circumvent, which will finally do him in.

Men and the world are mutually toxic to each other.

If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others.

It's easy to win. Anybody can win.

I try to ground most of my characters in reality somehow. That's kind of what I bring to the table.

Generally students are the best vehicles for passing on ideas, for their thoughts are plastic and can be molded and they can adjust the ideas of old men to the shape of reality as they find it in villages and hills of China or in ghettos and suburbs of America.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

We must admit with humility that, while number is purely a product of our minds, space has a reality outside our minds, so that we cannot completely prescribe its properties a priori.

Sometimes you get caught up in what's going on around you. The reality is that you are just a regular person. At some point, the career will be over, the bright lights turn off. That can come back to haunt you if you're not just a regular guy.

It's about the power of design and the power of the human spirit. It's above paying anybody to do something stupid for money like reality television does - like ambushing people.

I mean, the reality is unemployment today - over 14 million Americans are unemployed. That's exactly what it was a year ago. I mean, this - the American people know we can't borrow and spend and bail our way back to a growing economy.

There is only one admirable form of the imagination: the imagination that is so intense that it creates a new reality, that it makes things happen.

And then, I suppose, there's also a cinematic reality on top of that. Because it was extremely difficult to keep tabs on, it was quite confusing acting that.

In reality, the most important things happen when you don't look for them.

What I would have liked to do on that show was play a secretary of state who has huge personal business interests throughout the world. That, to me, seems to be more in synch with reality.