Talk:Rod Serling

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

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...

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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."

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

(What he enjoyed about writing) "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. Yeah, that's when I enjoy it. But during the desperate, tough time of creating it, there's not much I enjoy about it. It tires me and lays me out, which is sort of the way I feel now. Tired."

- TV.COM

"Everybody has to have a hometown, Binghamton's mine. In the strangely brittle, terribly sensitive make-up of a human being, there is a need for a place to hang a hat or a kind of geographical womb to crawl back into, or maybe just a place that's familiar because that's where you grew up. When I dig back through memory cells, I get one particularly distinctive feeling—and that's one of warmth, comfort and well-being. For whatever else I may have had, or lost, or will find—I've still got a hometown. This, nobody's gonna take away from me."

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

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

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

"Imagination... its limits are only those of the mind itself."

"Seeing is not always believing."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"If you need drugs to be a good writer, you're not a good writer."

"Hollywood's a great place to live...if you're a grapefruit."

"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."

"I grew up in a single family household and when you decide to go to the wall on your first project you really want to go with material that you're passionate about and I think that is one of the reasons I felt so compelled to make this film."

"I kept waiting for Rod Steiger to come out of the closet because I felt like I was in The Twilight Zone."

"Some people possess talent, others are possessed by it. When that happens, a talent becomes a curse."

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

Spoken by Rod Serling in Season 3, Episode 16 of The Twilight Zone, but it should be attributed to that episode's writer—George Clayton Johnson. The episode is titled "Nothing in the Dark" and the quote is extracted from its closing narration.

"Imagination... its limits are only those of the mind itself."

"The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs, and explosions, and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, ideas, predjudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy. A thoughtless, freightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all it's own for the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is, is that these things can not be confined to The Twilight Zone."