Richard Matheson Quotes

55 Sourced Quotes

I think we're yearning for something beyond the every day. And I will tell you that I don't believe in the supernatural, I believe in the supernormal. To me there is nothing that goes against nature. If it seems incomprehensible, it's because we haven't been able to understand it yet.

Richard Matheson
I hate it when something I've had published "inspires" some nut to imitate what I've written, or some teacher gets fired for having her students read one of my stories or novels.

Richard Matheson
This day father hit in the chain again before it had light. I have to try to pull it out again. He said I was bad to come upstairs. He said never do that again or he would beat me hard. That hurts.

Richard Matheson
Each memory was brought to life before me and within me. I could not avoid them. Neither could I rationalize, explain away. I could only re-experience with total cognizance, unprotected by pretense. Self delusion was impossible, truth exposed in this blinding light. Nothing as I thought it had been. Nothing as I hoped it had been. Only as it had been.

Richard Matheson
To his complete astonishment, he later found himself offering up a stumbling prayer that the dog would be protected. It was a moment in which he felt a desperate need to believe in a God that shepherded his own creations. But, even praying, he felt a twinge of self-reproach, and knew he might start mocking his own prayer at any second.
Somehow, though, he managed to ignore his iconoclastic self and went on praying anyway. Because he wanted the dog, because he needed the dog.

Richard Matheson
Sometimes he had indulged in daydreams about finding someone. More often, though, he had tried to adjust to what he sincerely believed was the inevitable — that he was actually the only one left in the world. At least in as much of the world as he could ever hope to know.

Richard Matheson
In a typical desperation for quick answers, easily understood, people had turned to primitive worship as the solution. With less than success. Not only had they died as quickly as the rest of the people, but they had died with terror in their hearts, with a mortal dread flowing in their very veins.

Richard Matheson
Despite everything he had or might have (except, of course, another human being), life gave no promise of improvement or even of change. The way things shaped up, he would live out his life with no more than he already had. And how many years was that? Thirty, maybe forty if he didn't drink himself to death.
The thought of forty more years of living as he was made him shudder.

Richard Matheson
When you sleep, your dream world is as real to you as life, isn't it?

Richard Matheson
Because there was only one thing worse than dying. And that was knowing you were going to die. And where. And how. ( Death Ship )

Richard Matheson
Memory was such a worthless thing, really. Nothing it dealt with was attainable. It was concerned with phantom acts and feelings, with all that was uncapturable except in thought. It was without satisfaction.

Richard Matheson
It is a secret but I have pulled the chain out of the wall. I can see out the little window all I like.

Richard Matheson
I've been very fortunate throughout my career. And I've been lucky enough to have worked with some great and talented people, like Price and Serling. I was just a part of the whole phenomenon coming together. They were exciting times that bubbled over with energy for all those involved.

Richard Matheson
George Romero filmed an homage to the book, and he called it Night of the Living Dead. Homage means I can make the picture and I don't have to pay you for your book. As a teen-ager I saw the movie "Dracula," and it occurred to me that if one vampire was scary, a whole world populated by vampires would be really scary.

Richard Matheson
Somewhere In Time is the story of a love which transcends time, What Dreams May Come is the story of a love which transcends death. … I feel that they represent the best writing I have done in the novel form.

Richard Matheson
…Those who've marred their appearance in any way by their actions in life aren't forced to witness that marring. If they were, they'd become self-conscious and be unable to concentrate on improving themselves.

Richard Matheson
True, he thought, but no one ever got the chance to know it. Oh, they knew it was something, but it couldn't be that — not that. That was imagination, that was superstition, there was no such thing as that.
And, before science had caught up with the legend, the legend had swallowed science and everything.

Richard Matheson
That's what was wrong with drinking too much. You became immune to drunken delights. There was no solace in liquor. Before you got happy, you collapsed.

Richard Matheson
Something black and of the night had come crawling out of the Middle Ages. Something with no framework or credulity, something that had been consigned, fact and figure, to the pages of imaginative literature. Vampires were passé; Summers' idylls or Stoker's melodramatics or a brief inclusion in the Britannica or grist for the pulp writer's mill or raw material for the B-film factories. A tenuous legend passed from century to century.
Well, it was true.

Richard Matheson
Really now, search your soul, lovie-is the vampire so bad? All he does is drink blood.

Richard Matheson
My wife and child and I were on a camping trip and we stopped in Virginia City. In the Opera House, I saw a photograph of Maude Adams, the famous American actress. It was such a great photograph that creatively I fell in love with her. What if some guy did the same thing and could go back in time?

Richard Matheson
Thank you... for gracing my life with your lovely presence, for adding the sweet measure of your soul to my existence.

Richard Matheson
All of us have a path to follow and the path begins on earth.

Richard Matheson
No longer will you be a weird Robinson Crusoe, imprisoned on an island of night surrounded by oceans of death.

Richard Matheson
I hope people are reading my work in the future. I hope I have done more than frightened a couple of generations. I hope I've inspired a few people one way or another.
Actually, the highlight of my life — which, of course, had an enormous influence on my writing career — was meeting Ruth Woodson on the beach in Santa Monica in 1951, falling in love with her, marrying her, and creating with her a family of four children; two sons, two daughters. My love for them, and growth because of them, made my writing life what it was. It's a process I advocate for any would-be writer.

Richard Matheson