What matters to me is the writing, the act of manufacturing the novel, because while I am doing it, at that particular moment, I am in the world I'm writing about. It is real to me, completely and utterly. Then, when I'm finished, and have to stop, withdraw from that world forever -- that destroys me. The men and women have ceased talking. They no longer move. I'm alone, without much money, and, as I said before, nearly forty. Where is Mr. Tagomi, the protagonist in Man in the High Castle? He has left me; we are cut off from each other. To read the novel does not restore Mr. Tagomi, place him once again where I can hear him talk. Once written, the novel speaks generally to everyone, not specifically to me. When a novel of mine comes out I have no more relationship to it than has anyone who reads it -- far less, in fact, because I have the memory of Mr. Tagomi and all the others. . . Gino Molinari, for example, in Now Wait for Last Year, or Leo Bulero in Three Stigmata. My friends are dead, and as much as I love my wife, daughter, cat -- none of these nor all of these is enough. The vacuum is terrible. Don't write for a living; sell shoelaces. Don't let it happen to you.
Phillip K. Dick
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