Rod Serling Quotes

Rod Serling challenges writers with blunt, witty thoughts on creativity, integrity and the harsh truths of art.

36 quotes

1. I happen to think that the singular evil of our time is prejudice. It is from this evil that all other evils grow and multiply. In almost everything I've written there is a thread of this: a man's seemingly palpable need to dislike someone other than himself.

2. If survival calls for the bearing of arms, bear them you must. But the most important part of the challenge is for you to find another means that does not come with the killing of your fellow man.

3. 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.

4. I think the destiny of all men is not to sit in the rubble of their own making but to reach out for an ultimate perfection which is to be had. At the moment, it is a dream. But as of the moment we clasp hands with our neighbor, we build the first span to bridge the gap between the young and the old. At this hour, it's a wish. But we have it within our power to make it a reality. If you want to prove that God is not dead, first prove that man is alive.

5. '...a medium best suited to illumine and dramatize the issues of the times has its product pressed into a mold, painted lily-white, and has its dramatic teeth yanked out one by one.'

6. '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 insticts are cut of an entirely different cloth. The fact remains that these gentlemen sell consumer goods, not an art form.'

7. All writers are born, they are never made. The talent to recreate in language, the experience of life is, has to be God-given.

8. Creativity is an altogether personal thing. It's an art that cannot be taught normally. It's a demanding, frustrating, challenge facet of the human experience...

9. Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.

10. Fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science Fiction is the improbable made possible.

11. I don't believe in reincarnation. That's a cop-out... I anticipate death will be a totally unconscious void in which you float through eternity with no particular consciousness of anything.

12. I was traumatized into writing by war events. By going through a war in a combat situation and feeling the desperate sense of terrible need for some sort of therapy. To get it out of my gut, write it down. This is the way it began for me.

13. Ideas come from the earth. They come from every human experience that you've either witnessed, or have heard about, translated into your brain, in your own sense of dialogue, in your own language form. Ideas are born, from what is smelled, heard, seen, experienced, felt, emotionalized. Ideas are probably in the air, like little tiny items of ozone. That's the easiest thing on earth is to come up with an idea. And the second thing is, the hardest thing on earth is to put it down.

14. If you need drugs to be a good writer, you are not a good writer.

15. It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.

16. It may be said with a degree of assurance that not everything that meets the eye is as it appears.

17. The creation of an idea, the following of a story germ, the building up of a plot, the creating of people of flesh-and-blood character - these are not easy things, they are extremely difficult. But conversely, don't be put off by the fact that this month you can't do it and next month is maybe even harder. This is, if not a lifetime process, it's awfully close to it. The writer broadens, becomes deeper, becomes more observant, becomes more tempered, becomes much wiser over a period time passing. It is not something that is injected into him by a needle. It is not something that comes on a wave of flashing, explosive light one night and say, 'Huzzah! Eureka! I've got it!' and then proceeds to write the great American novel in eleven days. It doesn't work that way. It's a long, tedious, tough, frustrating process, but never, ever be put aside by the fact that it's hard.

18. The instinct of creativity must be followed by the act, the physical act of putting it down for a sense of permanence. Once you get that prod, that emotional jar, that, 'I have witnessed something.' Or, 'I have felt something.' Or, 'I have seen something.' Or, through observation, 'I have been moved by an event.' I think the answer is, 'Get it down. Get it down quickly. Write it down.'

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

20. No one could know Serling, or view or read his work, without recognizing his deep affection for humanity ... and his determination to enlarge our horizons by giving us a better understanding of ourselves.

21. Every Superstate has one iron rule: logic is an enemy and the truth is a menace.

22. If you want to prove that God is not dead first prove that man is alive.

23. There is nothing in the dark that isn't there when the lights are on.

24. There are weapons that are simply thoughts. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy.

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

26. 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.

27. If in any quest for magic, in any search for sorcery, witchery, legerdemain, first check the human spirit.

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

29. I just want people to remember me a hundred years from now. I don't care that they're not able to quote any single line that I've written. But just that they can say, "Oh, he was a writer." That's sufficiently an honored position for me.

30. According to the Bible, God created the heavens and the Earth. It is man’s prerogative - and woman’s - to create their own particular and private hell.

31. If you're really a good writer and deserve that honored position, then by God, you'll write, and you'll be read, and you'll be produced somehow. It just works that way. If you're just a simple ordinary day-to-day craftsman, no different than most, then the likelihood is that you probably won't make it in writing.

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

33. I don't think it's man's function to write. I don't think it's a normal thing like teeth-brushing and going to the bathroom. It's a supered position on the animal.

34. Over the long haul I'd say that most directors I've worked with have been pretty sensitive to the quality of the interpreted scenes.

35. 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.

36. But it makes you wonder, doesn't it? Just how normal are we? Just who are the people we nod our hellos to as we pass on the street? A rather good question to ask - particularly in The Twilight Zone.