Success Quote by Bill Hicks

Hicks lands this line like a soft punch and a dare: if life is "only a dream", then the sturdy props of adulthood - career, status, even identity - start to look like stage dressing. Coming from a comedian who built his act on puncturing American certainties, the phrase isn’t New Age wallpaper. It’s an insurgent move. He’s using the language of mysticism to short-circuit the audience’s default operating system: stop treating the script as reality.

The second half is the real Hicks signature. "We are the imagination of ourselves" flips selfhood from something you discover into something you draft, rehearse, and revise. The subtext is equal parts liberation and indictment. Liberation, because if you’re imagined, you’re not stuck; you can redraw the borders of who you are. Indictment, because a lot of what people call "me" is outsourced: consumer branding, inherited fear, tribal politics, religious boilerplate. Hicks is mocking the grim sincerity with which we cling to these prefabricated selves.

Context matters: late-80s/early-90s America, an era of booming consumer culture, culture-war moralism, and mass media that rewarded conformity. Hicks’s comedy treated that landscape like a bad trip someone refused to admit they were on. The "dream" framing also gestures to psychedelics and Eastern philosophy, both recurring in his work, but he deploys them tactically, not devotionally - as rhetorical crowbars.

It works because it sounds comforting while smuggling in a threat: if you’re the author of you, then you’re also responsible for the mess.