Richard Matheson
Richard Matheson
Richard Burton Mathesonwas an American author and screenwriter, primarily in the fantasy, horror, and science fiction genres. He is best known as the author of I Am Legend, a 1954 horror novel that has been adapted for the screen four times, as well as the movie Somewhere In Time for which Matheson wrote the screenplay, based on his novel Bid Time Return. Matheson also wrote 16 television episodes of The Twilight Zone for Rod Serling, including "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScreenwriter
Date of Birth20 February 1926
CountryUnited States of America
I can get pissed off very easily.
Let the jagged edge of sobriety be now dulled.
Full circle. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend.
Heaven would never be heaven without you.
…They think of suicide as a quick route to oblivion, an escape. Far from it. It merely alters a person from one form to another. Nothing can destroy the spirit. Suicide only precipitates a darker continuation of the same conditions from which escape was sought. A condition under circumstances so much more painful.
What condemnation could possibly be more harsh than one’s own, when self-pretense is no longer possible?
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.
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.
Really now, search your soul, lovie-is the vampire so bad? All he does is drink blood.
In a world of monotonous horror there could be no salvation in wild dreaming. Horror he had adjusted to. But monotony was the greater obstacle, and he realized it now, understood it at long last. And understanding it seemed to give him a sort of quiet peace, a sense of having spread all the cards on his mental table, examined them, and settled conclusively on the desired hand.
No longer will you be a weird Robinson Crusoe, imprisoned on an island of night surrounded by oceans of death.
And, before science had caught up with the legend, the legend had swallowed science and everything.
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.
Now when I die, I shall only be dead.