Richard Matheson Quotes

Had I to give advice to writers (and I do not think they need it, because everyone has to find out things for himself), I would tell them simply this; I would ask them to tamper as little as they can with their own work. I do not think tinkering does any good. The moment comes when one has found out what one can do - when one has found one's natural voice, one's rhythm. Then I do not think that slight emendations should prove useful.

But my way of writing is rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, than much to consider who is listening to me; and, if I stop to consider what is proper to be said to this or that person, I shall soon come to doubt whether any part at all is proper.

I've always kind of ripped from real life to some degree or at least how I'm feeling in the moment. In fact, maybe that's really it. In anything I've ever written, all the characters sound like me, which I don't think is a bad thing.

My preferred style is to write in first person, so I always have to play around with possible narrator voices until I find something that works.

I have an affinity for writing in the first person. I love the intimacy of being dropped inside the character.

As a man lives and thinks, so he will write.

You should really stay true to your own style. When I first started writing, everybody said to me, 'Your style just isn't right because you don't use the really flowery language that romances have.' My romances - compared to what's out there - are very strange, very odd, very different. And I think that's one of the reasons they're selling.

I always seem to write personal songs; that's always been my go-to thing, to write about what I'm experiencing.

I think writing is a much more personal thing.

I like to write first-person because I like to become the character I'm writing.

It's a matter of style. The Evan Hunter style and the Ed McBain style are very, very different.

There is always going to be a little bit of me in each character.

I love to write. I used to be a math teacher. And I like the idea that other people could write about the same subjects, but no one would write it just the way I do. It's very individual: a child could write the same story as somebody else, but it wouldn't come out the same.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

I write the way I write.

All my characters have got a big slice of me in them. A big piece of me, because it's my dialogue and this is the way I think and talk.

Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.'

With any part you play, there is a certain amount of yourself in it. There has to be, otherwise it's just not acting. It's lying.

The way I write is totally instinctive. I just write what I feel or what I find funny - and hope everyone else agrees.

If you are any kind of writer at all, you are in all of your writings.

I believe an editor's job is to help a writer sound like himself or herself.

Books are really fun because your 'voice' is pretty undiluted. There is a very direct connection between yourself and your audience. You will have an editor, but their job is to help you clarify or improve your voice, not change it.

I think most people that do comedy write for themselves. I don't think there is any other way you can do it, really. Otherwise it would be quite cynical.

I never think of my audience when I write a poem. I try to write out of whatever is haunting me; in order for a poem to feel authentic, I have to feel I'm treading on very dangerous ground, which can mean that the resulting revelations may prove hurtful to other people. The time for thinking about that kind of guilt or any collective sense of responsibility, however, occurs much later in the creative process, after the poem is finished.

Lena Dunham or Miranda July, those people are sort of thinking about their work in a slightly different way than I do, where their whole body is a seed of what they're creating. I can't imagine watching Miranda's movies with anybody else playing her role, she's so integral. But for me, it feels more like every story is really individual. If I thought of something else, or thought it should be my body representing it, I'd fold my body into it. But most of the time I'm writing to get something out of my body.