Richard Matheson Quotes

There is a part of me that has to depend on fantasy, because if you can't be somewhat of a fantasy person, then you can't write

I get to draw what I like to draw, basically people hangin' around, and write very humanistic kinds of situations and characters. But I do also like to draw adventure stories - more in terms of drawing them than writing them - and letting my imagination go wild.

You can't write about fantasy without being ridiculous.

I like writing idealistically, romantically and swashbucklingly.

I just want to be as creative as I possibly can.

I saw literature as a fantasy, no less absorbing for all its irrelevance - a parallel life, as dreams shadow waking but never intersect it.

Fantasy is like jam. . . . You have to spread it on a solid piece of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing . . . out of which you can’t make anything.

I always knew I wanted to write really imaginative fiction - fiction that was very different from my real life.

The best thing to do is dive with your imagination ~ you can never drown yourself.

As an aspiring artist, you should strive for originality of vision. Have something to say and a fresh way of saying it. No story is worth the writing, no picture worth the making, if it’s not the work of the imagination.

Creative writing teachers should be purged until every last instructor who has uttered the words 'Write what you know' is confined to a labor camp. Please, talented scribblers, write what you don't. The blind guy with the funny little harp who composed The Iliad, how much combat do you think he saw?

The great thing about writing is, if you don't like the world, we'll create a different one.

Writing songs is no different than explaining to somebody what you dreamed last night: No one ever gives you crap for what you dreamed last night. "I was laying in my bed, and all of a sudden a stallion jumped on my bed and the next thing I know I was in Mars but it looked like my kitchen"... That's kind of what I do with my songs, write them in a dream-like manner. It's up to people to swallow it however they want.

Writing is really freeing because it's the only part of the process where it's just you and the characters and you are by yourself in a room and you can just hash it out. There are no limitations.

Not writing would be like going the rest of your life without having dreams.

There are no laws by which we can write Iliads.

Writing is flying in dreams. When you remember. When you can. When it works. It's that easy.

To the extent a person makes, invents or thinks something that is new to him, he may be said to have performed a creative act.

Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.

Artists aren't looking for you to write them something; they're looking for you to give them something new.

The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.

But writers INVITE ghosts, maybe; along with actors and artists, they are the only totally accepted mediums of our society. They make worlds that never were, populate them with people who never existed, and then invite us to join them in their fantasies. And we do it, don't we? Yes. We PAY to do it.

In the world of words the imagination is one of the forces of nature.