Quotes from Richard Matheson

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.

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

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.

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.

How long did it take for a past to die?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Robert Neville looked out over the new people of the earth. He knew he did not belong to them; he knew that, like the vampires, he was anathema and black terror to be destroyed. And, abruptly, the concept came, amusing to him even in his pain. ... Full circle. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend.

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.

Come out, Neville.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

A man could get used to anything if he had to.

'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.