Richard Matheson Quotes

It's always seductive to know where one stands in relation to the average.

I am normal. In fact, I think I might be more normal than anyone else.

I am one of the great army of mediocrity which constitutes the majority.

You have not yet learned that in this life you have to be like everyone else: the perfect mediocrity--no better, no worse. Individuality is a monster and it must be strangled in its cradle to make our friends feel comfortable.

Nothing is good but mediocrity. The majority has settled that, and finds fault with him who escapes it at whichever end... To leave the mean is to abandon humanity.

I wouldn't say I'm normal. But I'm relatively stable. When I think of normal, I think of mediocrity, and mediocrity scares the f--- out of me.

All my friends are super normal.

The only glory most of us have to hope for is the glory of being normal.

Normal is absolutely my least favorite word.

People want you to be ordinary.

Society is one word, but many things.

A lot of people go through life trying to perform normalcy, and I think you can relate to that.

I'm like every waitress in every diner; I'm like every mom driving her kids to school. I'm nothing special at all.

I am the mainstream.

I am just like everyone else.

Insanity is a very high art form. If everyone was insane, I wouldn't be here!

I don't want to be the crazy showbiz family. When I walk into the PTA meetings with my sensible flat shoes and my sensible short wig, I do not look crazy.

I'm an absolutely normal guy.

Who says what is the right way and what isn't? That is some imagined social construct that people made up to feel okay about being average.

There are so many kinds of normal.

The more backwoodish a social group, juvenile or adult, the stricter its conception of the normal, and the readier it will ridicule any departure from it.

Who's straight? I'm not. I am bent gouged pinched and tugged at, and squeezed into this funny shape. Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move, and now the flukey play is cramped and slow, a dream of constraint and cross-purpose, with each move forced, all pieces pinned and skewered and zugzwanged... But here and there we see these figures who appear to run on the true lines, and they are terrible examples. They're rich, usually.

Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.

Lord! what a strange world in which a man cannot remain unique even by taking the trouble to go mad!

And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary?