Richard Matheson Quotes

Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?

I have a feeling Virtual Reality will further expose the conceit that 'reality' is a fact. It will provide another reminder of the seamless continuity between the world outside and the world within, delivering another major hit to the old fraud of objectivity. 'Real,' as Kevin Kelly put it, 'is going to be one of the most relative words we'll have.'

What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.

Now that's a concept that's always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world - we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.

I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.

Reality has actually very little to do with truth; there is no necessary connection between the two.

Reality is inside the skull.

All biographers, no matter how sympathetic, end up using their subjects as mirrors to figure themselves out. I don't want to be anyone's mirror.

In some way there is no real life. It's always the story of your life that you're living.

When someone says his conclusions are objective, he means that they are based on prejudices which many other people share.

If truth is not acceptable, it becomes the imagination of others.

"Is," "is," "is" — the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything "is"; I only know how it seems to me at this moment.

I don't believe that you can talk about a photograph being true or false. I don't think such a claim has any meaning.

You can't talk about truth unless you talk about yourself.

It is difficult to see a situation for what it is when you are in the midst of it,” Tsukiko says. “It is too familiar. Too comfortable.

The switch that I'd like to throw on is the one that says, "Look, you're a human being whose mind is every bit as active as anybody else's. Your experiences are just as real." For that matter, even if they're even if they're crazy, they're valid. They occurred in this world so they're valid topics for literature.

Few men survey themselves with so much severity as not to admit prejudices in their own favor.

It should be quite clear, then, that there are no criteria to be laid down in general for distinguishing the real from the not real.

A thing is never seen as it really is.

- This isn't an interrogation or a trail. Your version of the truth is the only thing that matters. -Truth is singular. It's 'versions' are mistruths.

And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth.

It is not a camera, or a reporter that makes something real and genuine; more often a camera or a reporter does the opposite.

Distrust your judgment the moment you can discern the shadow of a personal motive in it.

I never aspire to be objective because I don't believe in objectivity. It's important to be truthful, and it's important to make sure that the audience has a solid sense of what the expectation should be of a particular film.

Objectivity is just male subjectivity.