Matheson Quotes & Sayings

For if you do, then shouldn't we blame the whole fraternity system? And if the whole fraternity system is guilty, then isn't this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you, Greg - isn't this an indictment of our entire American society? — Tim Matheson

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

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

Put me in a costume, and I'm your man. I must have one of those faces which seems to suit period drama more than modern films and TV programmes. But I'm not complaining, I love going back in time. I feel quite lucky because nobody knows who I am. I can walk about and have ordinary conversations with people. — Hans Matheson

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

Playing characters who are wonderful and beautiful is hard because you don't feel like that most of the time ... well, I don't. It's like this whole heart-throb nonsense. It's flattering, but that's not how I feel in the morning. It's something that goes with the job. — Hans Matheson

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

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

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

I think we're yearning for something beyond the every day. And I will tell you I don't believe in the supernatural, I believe in the supernormal. — Richard Matheson

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

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

In less than an hour I have to hold class for a group of idiot freshmen. And, on a desk in the living room, is a mountain of midterm examinations with essays I must suffer through, feeling my stomach turn at their paucity of intelligence, their adolescent phraseology. And all that tripe, all those miles of hideous prose, had been would into an eternal skein in his head. And there it sat unraveling into his own writing until he wondered if he could stand the thought of living anymore. I have digested the worst, he thought. Is it any wonder that I exude it piecemeal? ("Mad House") — Richard Matheson

They won't accept reasonable things with their minds but the fantastic things they'll swallow whole when their emotions are brought into play. Because the emotions have no limits on belief. The emotions will swallow anything - and they do. — Richard Matheson

(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

Tell me about Bryce, Sparrow." Effie bit into a cookie and aimed blue eyes her way.
She shrugged.
"What's to tell? He's the youngest of the Matheson brothers, but then maybe ye ken that since yer granddaughter is married to the eldest."
"No. Tell me about your relationship with him and how you ended up with his muddy hand prints on your boobs. I'm betting that story is a barn burner. — Vonnie Davis

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

I was born and raised in L.A. My father was born and raised in L.A. So we're old hands here. — Tim Matheson

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

On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back. — Richard Matheson

He stood there for a moment looking around the silent room, shaking his head slowly. All these books, he thought, the residue of a planet's intellect, the scrapings of futile minds, the leftovers, the potpourri of artifacts that had no power to save men from perishing. — Richard Matheson

Quiet is here and all in me. ("Dress of White Silk") — Richard Matheson

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

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

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

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

I think the problem I have with films is that, because there's so much hype around them, they become bigger than they should be, really. There are things that people do every day in their little workshops that they'll take to heaven with them. You've got to realise that it's not everything, making films. — Hans Matheson

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

When I auditioned for drama college, they asked me to do my Shakespeare. I couldn't do it. They asked me to do my modern, and I couldn't do it. They asked me if I had a song prepared, and I said 'No,' so I sang 'Happy Birthday.' And I did a reasonable improvisation, a reasonable one, nothing special at all. I don't know how I got in, but I did. — Hans Matheson

That's quite a difficult thing in life, to be who you are. And when you are doing interviews, you kind of feel this need to say something interesting. — Hans Matheson

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

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

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

Christian love is the only kind of love in which there is no rivalry, no jealousy. There is jealousy among the lovers of art; there is jealousy among the lovers of song; there is jealousy among the lovers of beauty. The glory of natural love is its monopoly, its power to say, 'It is mine. ' But the glory of Christian love is its refusal of monopoly. — George 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

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

... 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

I'm part of a party that I think values making sure that everyone in this country has an opportunity to succeed. That's why I'm a Democrat. — Jim Matheson

Crossing your fingers, Neville? Knocking on wood?
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.
Makes a good excuse, doesn't it, Neville? Oh, shut up. — Richard Matheson

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

Death is a fascinating lure to men who can stand aside and watch it operate on someone else. (from "The Conqueror") — Richard Matheson

The journey as a writer is not so much about our stories, but the stories of others we meet along the way on our wonderful path. #grateful — Lee Bice-Matheson

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

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

I always wanted to be an actor. I was one of those lucky kids - or cursed kids - who always knew what he wanted to do. — Tim Matheson

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

I like real stories. — Tim Matheson

I will have reached the point of greatest strength once I have learned to wait for hope. — George Matheson

That wind of terrible and jealous beauty blowing over me - that dark fire, that music ... — Richard Matheson

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

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

The man of my dreams is almost faded now. The one I have created in my mind. The sort of man each woman dreams of in her most secret and deepest part of her heart. I could almost see him now before me. What would I say to him if he were really here? Forgive me, I've never known this feeling. I've lived without it all my life. Is it any wonder that I fail to recognize it? You brought it to me for the first time. Is there any way I can tell you how my life has changed? Anyway at all, to let you know what sweetness you have given me? There's so much to say
and I can't find the words
except for these ... I love you. That is what I would say to him if he were really here. — Richard Matheson

For him the word 'horror' had become obsolete. — Richard Matheson

There are, occasionally, writers who are able to combine both story and style. They are, of course, the best. You get a spectacular view and you also get to look at it from the backseat of a chauffeur-driven Cadillac. In the field of fantasy, those writers able to combine story-as-narration with story-as-style are even rarer. But there are a few ... the late Theodore Sturgeon, the early Ray Bradbury ... and Richard Christian Matheson. A brilliant chip off the old block. — Stephen King

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

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

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

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

When I launched my first campaign in 1999, I knew that the arc of my public service would have many chapters. — Jim Matheson

When a writer with a voice as good as Richard Christian Matheson's tells you something, you have no choice but to listen. In THE RITUAL OF ILLUSION the voices are legion, and the gaps between their testimonies drag us closer to understanding the darkly beating heart of all our, ephemeral, transfixing dreams. Dark, subtle, horrifically funny. — Michael Marshall Smith

Destiny's Gate is filled with darkness and light. If you identify with the darkness, this is a good sign as we all have to embrace the darkness within us in order to heal and be brought into the Light as One. — Lee Bice-Matheson

Miniture protoplasm, the dirty little bastard! — Richard Matheson

I can get pissed off very easily. — Richard Matheson

If we have the sense to give (broadcasting) freedom and intelligent direction, if we save it from exploitation by vested interests of money or power, its influence may even redress the balance in favour of the individual. — Hilda Matheson

You know, I'm a big comic book fan. As a kid I used to collect them until there was a horrible mudslide in Hollywood and I lost my collection, but I was also at an early age the voice of 'Jonny Quest;' it was a cartoon; so I am kind of a latent fan boy. — Tim Matheson

Desperate need to believe in a God that shepherded his own creations. — Richard Matheson

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

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

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

Change is good, and ultimately, creating a new path at this point in my life is energizing, creative, and rejuvenating. — Tim Matheson

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

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

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

Winters, Matheson, Nixon, and the others existed," Private Rader remembered. "These were first-class people, and to think these men would care and share their time and efforts with us seemed a miracle. They — Stephen E. Ambrose

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

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

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

Here we are, kiddies, sitting like a bug in a rug, snugly, surrounded by a battalion of bloodsuckers who wish no more than to sip freely of my bonded, 100 proof hemoglobin. Have a drink, men, this one's really on me. — Richard Matheson

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

It is truly time to inspire your mind, whatever your dreams may be! Don't wait for tomorrow, whatever your sorrows. Today is the day to 'believe'. Jump to it! written by Lee Bice-Matheson, c2011. — Lee Bice-Matheson

To his complete astonishment, he later found himself
offering up a stumbling prayer that the dog would be protected. It was a mo ment 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

It's not square to say a prayer. — Lee Bice-Matheson

'I Am Legend' is quite unusual for its time. I just wanted to write a story about female boxers, and I couldn't get that going in my mind. I don't know exactly where the idea of just a man pitting himself against a robot boxer came from. — Richard Matheson

I could never write about strange kingdoms. I could never do 'Harry Potter' or anything like that. Even when I did science-fiction, I didn't write about foreign planets and distant futures. I certainly never did fantasies about trolls living under bridges. — Richard Matheson

Come out, Neville. — Richard Matheson

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

I allow myself to have my feelings of disappointment and discouragement, but never to sit and wallow in them. — Tim Matheson

What are the Democrats, the party of Jim Matheson, telling them? The message of the Democrats is that the Amercian dream is over. 'The government is all you have. Give up your dreams, and the government will save you, the government will heal you, the government will be your hope and change.' We know here in Utah, none of that is true. — Mia Love

The cross. He held one in his hand, gold and shiny in the morning sun. This, too, drove the vampires away.
Why? Was there a logical answer, something he could accept without slipping on banana skins of mysticism? — Richard Matheson

Richard Christian Matheson is a master of compression. He knows how to catch a moment in words and convey it straight to the reader's heart. — Clive Barker

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

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

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

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

There is nothing like raising a child in a home filled with love and respect ... to watch them blossom as an adult, filled with hopes and dreams and good intentions. Dedicated to our son, my coauthor, J.R. Matheson. We wish you all the best Justin! Love you. — Lee Bice-Matheson

Challenges are lessons to be learned,then overcome. — Lee Bice-Matheson

I attribute the black tones in my films to Stephen King, Tim Burton, Joe Hill and Richard Matheson. However, most of my writing is influenced by mental health. I'm incredibly passionate about shedding light on the stigmas associated with mental illnesses. — Anna Akana

He turned away from the bar as if he could leave the question there. But questions had no location; they could follow him around. — Richard Matheson