Rod Serling Quotes

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

I dreamed instead of did. I wished and hoped instead of tried.

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

The writer's role is to menace the public's conscience. He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus on the issues of his time.

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

The cemetery, my dear. The repository of the deceased. The tomb … the vault … the crypt … the resting place … the ossuary. Dig? Boot Hill, baby.” Pamela

As he looked at his reflection in the dresser mirror, he felt that recurring surprise that the tall, attractive man staring back was he, and beyond that was the wonder that the image bore no real relationship to the man himself.

It's simply a national acknowledgement that in any kind of priority, the needs of human beings must come first. Poverty is here and now. Hunger is here and now. Racial tension is here and now. Pollution is here and now. These are the things that scream for a response. And if we don't listen to that scream - and if we don't respond to it - we may well wind up sitting amidst our own rubble, looking for the truck that hit us - or the bomb that pulverized us. Get the license number of whatever it was that destroyed the dream. And I think we will find that the vehicle was registered in our own name.
[from a Commencement Address at the University of Southern California; March 17, 1970]

[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.

For the record, suspicion can kill, and prejudice can destroy. And a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own, for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.

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

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

Trying to be the best at anything carries its own special risks, in or out of the Twilight Zone.

For the first time in television a writer will have the opportunity to let his imagination take him where ever he wants to. The sky is no longer the limit.

You see, we can feed the stomach with concentrates, we can supply microfilm for reading, recreation, even movies of a sort, we can pump oxygen in, and waste material out, but there’s one thing we can’t simulate. That’s a very basic need. Man’s hunger for companionship. The barrier of loneliness, that’s one thing we haven’t licked yet.