Top 141 Quotes & Sayings by Rod Serling - Page 2

Justice can span years. Retribution is not subject to a calendar.

Essentially, the scripts are not that different. Let's say, in literary terms, it's the difference between writing horizontally and writing vertically. In live television, you wrote much more vertically. You had to probe people because you didn't have money or sets or any of the physical dimensions that film will allow you. So you generally probed people a little bit more. Film writing is much more horizontal. You can insert anything you want: meadows, battlefields, the Taj Mahal, a cast of thousands. But essentially, writing a story is writing a story.

You must always assume that the relationship between writer and producer is that of adversaries - however you slice it. They may be your dearest friends, and they'll invite you to dinner, but when all the smoke clears and the ozone lifts, your enemy is the producer, that's the guy you're competing with, and you have to battle him, just as if you were an adversary.

Most screenplays, most motion pictures, owe much more to the screenplay. Ingmar Bergman has such an economy of language, so little language in his piece, it is so visual, his moods are introduced and buttressed by camera rather than by word or character. But again, that's unique.

I would guess that the price of the script really is secondary. The credit is much more the essence.

In eleven or twelve years of writing, Mike, I can lay claim to at least this: I have never written beneath myself. I have never written anything that I didn't want my name attached to. I have probed deeper in some scripts and I've been more successful in some than others. But all of them that have been on, you know, I'll take my lick. They're mine and that's the way I wanted them.

I don't enjoy any of the process of writing. I enjoy it when it goes on if it zings and it has great warmth and import and it's successful.

You're looking at a species of flimsy little two-legged animals with extremely small heads whose name is Man...Very tiny undeveloped brain; comes from primitive planet named Earth. Calls himself 'Samuel Conrad'. And he will remain here in his cage with the running water and the electricity and the central heat- as long as he lives. Samuel Conrad has found the Twilight Zone.

I think I'd rather win, for example, a Writer's Guild award than almost anything on earth. And the few nominations I've had with the guild, and the few awards I've had, represented to me a far more legitimate concrete achievement than anything.

I'm a Western-cultured man who subscribes to the ancient saw that men do not cry, I don't cry either. I'll go to a movie, for example, and not infrequently something triggers the urge to weep, but I don't allow myself.

If you write beautifully, you write beautifully, that's all.

There's a marvelous and unique man named Frank Gilroy. He's the only writer I know who absolutely, pointedly refuses to do any changes that he doesn't feel are absolutely essential and totally in keeping with his own view and perspective. But not too many writers are that independent and that strong-willed.

I don't feel, God dictated that I should write.

I'd rather go along with this sense of illusion that I'm a neutral beast going along through life doing everything that's preordained.

I don't believe in reincarnation. That's a cop-out, I know. I don't really want to be reincarnated.

Apparently on the screen I look tall, ageless, and damned close to omniscient-delivering jeopardy-laden warnings through gritted teeth. But when people see me on the street, they say 'by God, this kid is 5 foot 5, he's got a broken nose, and looks about as foreboding as a bank teller on a lunch break.'

Somehow, some way, incredibly enough, good writing ultimately gets recognized. If you're a really good writer and deserve that honored position, then by God, you'll write, and you'll be read.

I don't have any system. I dictate a lot, through a machine, and I also have a secretary. But I used to type just like everybody else.

Science fiction makes the implausible possible, while science fantasy makes the impossible plausible.

Personally, my daughter's wedding gave me a tremendous pleasure.

You could do much more in movies than you could on TV, and even movies were heavily censored. But in television, the areas of timorousness were fairly laid out. Race relations. Sex. Politics. There was a whole conglomeration of taboo themes. And even to date, though television has become a much freer medium, it's still far less free, far less creatively untrammeled than are the movies. They're infinitely more adult in that respect.

I'm sufficiently independent to know that I can live well and comfortably all the rest of my life whether I'm rejected or not.

How can you put out a meaningful drama when every fifteen minutes proceedings are interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits with toilet paper? No dramatic art form should be dictated and controlled by men whose training and instincts are cut of an entirely different cloth. The fact remains that these gentlemen sell consumer goods, not an art form.

Writers, like most human beings, are adaptable creatures. They can learn to accept subordination without growing fond of it. No writer can forever stand in the wings and watch other people take the curtain calls while his own contributions get lost in the shuffle.

I guess we all have a little vaunting itch for immortality, I guess that must be it.

I've never really topped myself, because awards in themselves really don't reflect major accomplishment. It's kind of a strange, backslapping ritual that we go through in this town where you get awards for almost everything. For surviving the day you're going to get awards.

I guess Requiem for a Heavyweight as old as it is was as honest a piece as I've ever done.

I choose to think of tv audience as nameless, formless, faceless people who are all like me. And anything that I write, if I like it, they'll like it.

I'm an affluent screenwriter and all that - I'm a known screenwriter, but I'm not in the fraternity of the very, very major people. I would say a guy like Ernie Lehman, William Goldman, and a few others are quite a cut above.

I was deeply interested in conveying what is a deeply felt conviction of my own. This is simply to suggest that human beings must involve themselves in the anguish of other human beings. This, I submit to you, is not a political thesis at all. It is simply an expression of what I would hope might be ultimately a simple humanity for humanity's sake.

I'd love to be able to write an in-depth piece of what causes men like [Richard] Nixon and [H.R.]Haldeman and [John] Ehrlichman and all the rest of them not only to run, but what causes us to vote for them.

(on being born on Christmas Day, 1924) I was a Christmas present that was delivered unwrapped.

I have compromised down the line. I've disliked it intensely in the old days when you were trying to talk race relations and they would not allow you to talk about the legitimacies of race relations. In the old days, you didn't talk about black, you talked about Eskimo or American Indian, and the American Indian was assumed not to be a problem area.

There are a lot I'm proud of, and a lot I wish the hell I'd never written.

I think Willa Cather did a short story called "Paul's Case," and in it, when he finally commits suicide, it says, "He surrendered to the black design of things." And that's what I anticipate death will be: a totally unconscious void in which you float through eternity with no particular consciousness of anything. I think once around is enough. I don't want to start it all over again.

I don't know what my friends do. Generally they become producers. That way they can stop writing!

I've written all that I've wanted to write to date.

People are put down in television now, not because they're not qualitative, not because they're not talented - but because there's no room for them, and worse than that, there's nowhere they can find exposure. Their own good talent may die of mourning, just for want of having somebody read what they've written. I don't presume to say how we can best provide platforms for new writers to get read. I don't know. But therein lies the major problem.

Just drawing back and drawing in; becoming narcissistic.

I've never planned ahead.I just sort of go through life checking the menu of three meals that day. I never worry about tomorrow. It's only since I've gotten older that I've begun to wonder about time running out. Is it sufficient unto itself that I don't plan? Because maybe next Thursday won't come one day. And then, I'm concerned about that. But that's not uniquely the writer's concern, that's the concern of every middle-aged man who looks in the mirror.

If the producer doesn't like you, consequently he reads the script with a very negative view. But I wouldn't preoccupy myself with that, I don't give a damn. You can be a hunchback and a dwarf and whatall.

If it sounds good as you say it, likely as not it'll sound good when an actor's saying it.

Not since the British raided Cologne had so many bombs landed in such a small space in such a short time.

In terms of screenwriting adaptations it's trying to cut out stuff that's extraneous, without doing damage to the original piece, because you owe a debt of some respect to the original author. That's why it was bought.

I find it very difficult to live through the censorship of profanity on television.

a basic “must” for every writer: A simple solitude-physical & mental.

An Ingmar Bergman film would probably owe a sizeable bulk of its import and its direction and its quality to the directorial end and to the director because it's uniquely a Bergman film. But that again is not the general - no, that's much more the exception than the rule.

Why do I write? I guess that's been asked of every writer. I don't know. It isn't any massive compulsion.

The most important thing about the first sale is for the very first time in your life something written has value and proven value because somebody has given you money for the words that you've written, and that's terribly important, it's a tremendous boon to the ego, to your sense of self-reliance, to your feeling about your own talent.

The writer's no different. When he's rejected, that paper is rejected, in a sense, a sizeable fragment of the writer is rejected as well. It's a piece of himself that's being turned down.

I remember the first sale I made was a hundred and fifty dollars for a radio script, and, as poor as I was, I didn't cash the check for three months. I kept showing it to people.

I ask for your indulgence when I march out quotations. This is the double syndrome of men who write for a living and men who are over forty. The young smoke pot - we inhale from our 'Bartlett's.'

Writers vary tremendously. Was it Tom Wolfe who stood up or was it [Ernest] Hemingway who had to stand up? I don't know.

There are millions of ways to not be writing. You say you're not in the mood, you'll pick it up tomorrow.

The tendency when you dictate is to overwrite, because you're not counting pages, you don't really know what the hell the page count is.

Whenever you write, whatever you write, never make the mistake of assuming the audience is any less intelligent than you are.

I suppose we think euphemistically that all writers write because they have something to say that is truthful and honest and pointed and important. And I suppose I subscribe to that, too. But God knows when I look back over thirty years of professional writing, I'm hard-pressed to come up with anything that's important. Some things are literate, some things are interesting, some things are classy, but very damn little is important.

I would guess that Ray Bradbury would be equally resentful of what they did with Illustrated Man, which, you know, took a central idea thesis of his and pissed all over it - made it into one of the worst movies ever made.

You can be a hunchback and a dwarf and what-all. If you write beautifully, you can write beautifully.

I'm frequently surprised, sometimes bugged off, and sometimes happy, depending on the actor. It's a fact of life that just as often as not an actor can breathe life into a line as he can destroy it by misinterpretation, and I've been blessed frequently by having good actors.