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Richard Matheson Quotes & Sayings

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Famous Quotes By Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1964235

He ignored that, beginning to suspect his mind of harboring an alien. Once he might have termed it conscience. Now it was only an annoyance. Morality, after all, had fallen with society. He was his own ethic. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1190674

Not only did I rediscover every experience of my life, I had to live each unfulfilled desire as well - as though they'd been fulfilled. I saw that what transpires in the mind is just as real as any flesh and blood occurrence. What had only been imagination in life, now became tangible, each fantasy a full reality. I lived them all - while, at the same time, standing to the side, a witness to their, often, intimate squalor. A witness cursed with total objectivity. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1966783

Why should a Jew fear the cross?" he said. "Why should a vampire who had been a Jew fear it? Most people were afraid of becoming vampires. Most of them suffer from hysterical blindness before mirrors. But as far as the cross goes - well, neither a Jew nor a Hindu nor a Mohammedan nor an atheist, for that matter, would fear the cross." She — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 488420

Staring down at the brook, I remembered a stream near Mammoth Lake. We'd parked the camper just above it and, all night, listened to it splashing across rocks and stones; a lovely sound. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1021512

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. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1488214

Heaven would never be heaven without you. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 695805

To me there is nothing that goes against nature. If it seems incomprehensible, it's only because we haven't been able to understand it yet. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 2009493

... Not that it was unjust; not that the scales were forced out of balance. Where there had been good, it showed as clearly. Kindnesses, accomplishments, all those were present, too. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1573452

Then he went into the dining room, consulting his watch. It was ten thirty already. More than half the morning was gone. More than half the time for sitting and trying to write the prose that would make people sit up and gasp. It happened that way more often now than he would even admit to himself. Sleeping late, making up errands, doing anything to forestall the terrible moment when he must sit down before his typewriter and try to wrench some harvest from the growing desert of his mind. ("Mad House") — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 121866

How quickly one accepts the incredible if only one sees it enough. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1369594

Yet, despite all, it is a difficult thing to admit the existence of ghosts in a coldly factual world. One's very instincts rebel at the admission of such maddening possibility. For, once the initial step is made into the supernatural, there is no turning back, no knowing where the strange road leads except that it is quite unknown and quite terrible. ("Slaughter House") — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1481677

Very well then! I'll write, write write. He let the words soak into his mind and displace all else.
A man had a choice, after all. He devoted his life to his work or to his wife and children and home. It could not be combined; not in this day and age. In this insane world where God was second to income and goodness to wealth. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 869636

After a while, though, even the deepest sorrow faltered, even the most penetrating despair lost its scalpel edge. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1041440

No, by God, he had no intention of going on like a blind man, plodding down a path of brainless, fruitless existence until old age or accident took him. Either he found the answer or he ditched the whole mess, life included. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 368971

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

Richard Matheson Quotes 1247356

Everything seemed to flood over him then. It was as though he'd been the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, refusing to let the sea of reason in. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 946710

Our world is in profound danger. Mankind must establish a set of positive values with which to secure its own survival.
This quest for enlightenment must begin now.
It is essential that all men and women become aware of what they are, why they are here on Earth and what they must do to preserve civilization before it is too late. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 896694

(After death.) So few people who come across, possess awareness of any kind. All they bring along with them are worthless values. All they desire is continuation of what they had in life no matter how misguided or degraded ... Will those people ever progress, even with our help? — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1138174

How shall I typify what happened? Passion play? Somewhat. Weird tale? Indubitably. Horror story? Pretty close. Grotesque melodrama? Certainly. Black comedy? Your point of view will determine that. Perhaps it was a combination of them all ...
So, to the story. A chronicle of greed and cruelty, horror and rapacity, sadism and murder.
Love, American style. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 730254

Failures plagued me. Things I had omitted or ignored, neglected. What I should have given and hadn't. I felt the biting pang of every unfulfillment. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 418792

I looked at all the people, feeling sorry for them. They were still subordinate to clock and calendar. Absolved of that, I stood becalmed. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1076848

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

Richard Matheson Quotes 1227745

Chris:I forgive you.
Annie: For killing my children and my sweet husband?
Chris: For being so wonderful a guy would choose hell over heaven just to be around you.
Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 203799

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

Richard Matheson Quotes 1054590

Perhaps jungle life, despite physical danger, was a relaxing one. Surely it was free of the petty grievances, the disparate values of society. It was simple, devoid of artifice and ulcer-burning pressures. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 793041

And, before science had caught up with the legend, the legend had swallowed science and everything. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 721044

The vampire was real. It was only that his true story had never been told. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 2250481

I wish I were a boy again-unquestioning, with no need to analyze the moment. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 2215508

The red hands had stopped at four-twenty-seven. He wondered what day they had stopped. As he descended the stairs with his armful of books, he wondered at just what moment the clock stopped. Had it been morning or night? Was it raining or shining? Was anyone there when it stopped? — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 2221013

There we will, I pray, remain and learn and grow until the time when we will rise together to the ultimate heights, changing in appearance but never in devotion, sharing the transcendent glory of our love through all eternity. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 2234450

She felt all right. Her heart was like a drum hanging from piano wire in her chest, slowly, slowly beaten. Her hands and feet were numb, not with cold but with a sultry torpor. Thoughts moved with a tranquil lethargy, her brain a leisurely machine imbedded in swaths of woolly packing.
She felt all right. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1485039

It is June 27, 1912. You are lying in your bed in the Grand Hotel and it is 6 p.m. on the evening of June 27, 1912. Your mind accepts this absolutely. 6 p.m. on June 27, 1912. Elise McKenna is in this hotel at this very moment. Her manager, William Fawcett Robinson, is in this hotel at this very moment. Now, this moment, here. Both in the Grand Hotel on this evening of June 27, 1912. 6 p.m. on June 27, 1912. Elise McKenna, now, in this hotel. She and her company are in this hotel at this very moment. Now on June 27, 1912, 6 p.m. Your mind accepts this, absolutely. You have traveled back in time, soon you will open your eyes. You will walk into the corridor, and you will go downstairs and you will find Elise McKenna, who is in this hotel at this very moment. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 2240676

What dreams you white-frocked kiddies have in the sanctified cloister of your laboratories. You can make yourself believe anything after a while. As long as you can make up a measurement for it. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1476209

That which you believe becomes your world. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1434200

But it's so hard to make things simple and so easy to make them complicated. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1502811

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

Richard Matheson Quotes 1425005

God, how impossible life is without money. Nothing can ever overcome it, it's everything when it's anything. How can I write in peace with endless worries of money, money, money? ("Disappearing Act") — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 2264597

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

Richard Matheson Quotes 1316236

He thought about that visionary lady. To die, he thought, never knowing the fierce joy and attendant comfort of a loved one's embrace. To sink into that hideous coma, to sink then into death and, perhaps, return to sterile, awful wanderings. All without knowing what it was to love and be loved.
That was a tragedy more terrible than becoming a vampire. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1310376

I had to write about realistic circumstances. That's the way my brain works. And I think that gave me a sort of place in the field. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 119828

It was a fairy tale, no fooling. It was unreality becoming real. This frightened her. Because people don't care for unreality becoming real. It pricks their well-fed minds, you see, with something like a hunger pang. They prefer the logical stuffiness of expectancy. It is only at certain times that they weaken, letting imagination in. That's the time to get them. ("The Disinheritors") — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1246222

Goddamn your bones, that is the first step. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 2268486

If I could die now, he thought; peacefully, gently, without a tremor or a crying out. If I could be with her. If I could believe I would be with her. His — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1620904

... 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

Richard Matheson Quotes 1733194

Full circle. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1794576

I think What Dreams May Come is the most important (read effective) book I've written. It has caused a number of readers to lose their fear of death the finest tribute any writer could receive ... Somewhere In Time is my favorite novel. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1801016

I felt puny and absurd, a ludicrous midget. Easy enough to talk of soul and spirit and essential worth, but not when you're three feet tall. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1712845

A man could get used to anything if he had to. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1693647

Everyone has something to hide. And if they couldn't hide it the world would be in a lot worse mess than it is. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1673987

Well, why not? Why not go out? It was a sure way to be free of them. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1664090

The keynote of minority prejudice is this: They are loathed because they are feared. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1628103

The foraging for food and water, the struggle for life in a world without masters, housed in a body that man had made dependent on himself. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 2184875

As her analyst had told her: the deeper buried the distress, the further into the body it went. The digestive system was about as far as it could go to hide. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1574890

He brushed his teeth carefully and used dental floss. He tried to take good care of his teeth because he was his own dentist now. Some things could go to pot, but not his health, he thought. Then why don't you stop pouring alcohol into yourself? he thought. Why don't you shut the hell up? he thought. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1961940

Normalcy was a majority concept, the standard of many and not the standard of just one man. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1970925

But are his needs any more shocking than the needs of any other animals and men? Are his deeds more outrageous than the deeds of the parent who drained the spirit from his child? The vampire may foster quickened heartbeats and levitated hair. But is he worse than the parent who gave to society a neurotic child who became a politician? Is he worse than the manufacturer who set up belated foundations with the money he made by handing bombs and guns to suicidal nationalists? Is he worse than the distiller who gave bastardized grain juice to stultify further the brains of those who, sober, were incapable of progressive thought? (Nay, I apologize for this calumny; I nip the brew that feeds me.) Is he worse, then, than the publisher who filled ubiquitous racks with lust and death wishes? Really, no, search your soul, lovie
is the vampire so bad? — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1994187

The silence of the library was complete save for the thudding of his shoes as he walked along the second-floor hallway. Outside, there were birds sometimes and, even lacking that, there seemed to be a sort of sound outside. Inexplicable, perhaps, but it never seemed deathly still in the open as it did inside a building.
Especially here in this giant, gray-stoned building that housed the literature of a world's dead. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 2053054

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

Richard Matheson Quotes 1570475

But it was hard to keep his hands still. He could almost feel them twitching emphatically with his strong desire to reach out and stroke the dog's head. He had such a terrible yearning to love something again, and the dog was such a beautiful ugly dog. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1763125

What condemnation could possibly be more harsh than one's own, when self-pretense is no longer possible? — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 382824

He pretended it was the only thing that kept him from it. But, far back in his mind, he wondered if he could write anything. Often the question threw itself at him when he was least expecting it. You have four hours every morning, the statement would rise like a menacing wraith. You have time to write many thousands of words. Why don't you? And the answer was always lost in a tangle of becauses and wells and endless reasons that he clung to like a drowning man at straws. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 691428

Such thoughts were a hideous testimony to the world he had accepted; a world in which murder was easier than hope. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 606560

Come out, Neville. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 598600

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

Richard Matheson Quotes 585743

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

Richard Matheson Quotes 475632

Fresh air, quiet, and the calming stimulus of the movement on the earth beneath the sky; that's why she loves to walk so much. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 417373

It is my conviction that basic Reality is not all that perplexing. What seems difficult to assimilate are the manifold details of Reality, not its fundamental elements. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 416038

She sounded angry. That was the way she'd been as long as he'd known her. If she became ill, it irritated her. She was annoyed by sickness. She seemed to regard it as a personal affront. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 414798

Was the life force something more than words, a tangible, mind-controlling potency? Was nature somehow, in him, maintaining its spark against its own encroachments? — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 403394

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

Richard Matheson Quotes 788439

When Morton Silkline reached the hall, his customer was just flapping out a small window. Quite suddenly, Morton Silkline found the floor. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 352681

Miniture protoplasm, the dirty little bastard! — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 341970

I can get pissed off very easily. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 272452

God help me, he thought. God help all us poor wretches who could create and find we must lose our hearts for it because we cannot afford to spend our time at it. ("Mad House") — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 254566

Everyone has a secret place in his mind. Otherwise relationships would be impossible. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 247303

What would a Mohammedan vampire do if faced with a cross? — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 202462

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

Richard Matheson Quotes 191029

I wrote about real people and real circumstances and real neighborhoods. There was no crypt or castles or H.P. Lovecraft-type environments. They were just about normal people who had something bizarre happening to them in the neighborhood. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 146111

People are not punished for their deeds but by them — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 139561

It was more than a spider. It was every unknown terror in the world fused into wriggling, poison-jawed horror. It was every anxiety, insecurity, and fear in his life given a hideous, night-black form. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1038978

In a world of monotonous horror
there could be no salvation in wild dreaming. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1222226

For he was a man and he was alone and these things had no importance to him. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1221828

But now, in the final hours, even hope had vanished. Yet he could smile. At a point without hope he had found contentment. He knew he had tried and there was nothing to be sorry for. And this was complete victory, because it was a victory over himself. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1216925

She doesn't have to even give me supper. Im not hungry anyway.
Im full. (Dress of White Silk) — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1208469

Everything is mental, — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1200307

Now when I die, I shall only be dead. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1168873

Patience, he told himself. Get yourself at least one virtue, anyway. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1143461

To look at the entire journey all at once was stupidity. You thought of it in segments; that was the only way. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1137070

I'm sitting in my office trying to squeeze a story from my head. It is that kind of morning when you feel like melting the typewriter into a bar of steel and clubbing yourself to death with it. ("Advance Notice") — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1106082

The last man in the world was irretrievably stuck with his delusions. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1223978

He kept thinking about Mary. What a fool he'd been to let her go. To think, with the thoughtless assurance of youth, that the world was replete with endless possibilities. He'd thought it a mistake to choose so early in life and embrace the present good. He'd been a great one for looking for greener pastures. He'd kept looking until all his pastures were brown with time. ("Old Haunts") — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 1020304

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

Richard Matheson Quotes 1014324

If you go too far in fantasy and break the string of logic, and become nonsensical, someone will surely remind you of your dereliction ... Pound for pound, fantasy makes a tougher opponent for the creative person. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 917174

You bastard, he thought, almost affectionately, watching the minuscule protoplasm fluttering on the slide. You dirty little bastard. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 869172

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

Richard Matheson Quotes 867895

This, he knew, was courage, the truest, ultimate courage, because there was no one here to sympathize or praise him for it. What he felt was felt without the hope of commendation. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 866306

You can get used to horror, he thought. When it has lost immediacy and is no longer pungent and has become a steady diet. When it has degraded to a chain of mind-numbing events. ("Lover When You're Near Me") — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 824567

How
long did it take for a past to die? — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 809880

... They think of suicide as a quick route to oblivion, an escape. Far from it. It merely alters a person from one form to another. Nothing can destroy the spirit. Suicide only precipitates a darker continuation of the same conditions from which escape was sought. A condition under circumstances so much more painful. — Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson Quotes 804405

We've forgotten much. How to struggle, how to rise to dizzy heights and sink to unparalleled depths. We no longer aspire to anything. Even the finer shades of despair are lost to us. We've ceased to be runners. We plod from structure to conveyance to employment and back again. We live within the boundaries that science has determined for us. The measuring stick is short and sweet. The full gamut of life is a brief, shadowy continuum that runs from gray to more gray. The rainbow is bleached. We hardly know how to doubt anymore. ("The Thing") — Richard Matheson