Rick Moody Quotations

The point is to balance on the edge between musicality and content.

writing about the classics is a really important exercise, because you really need to dig deep to do it

We ran hard and had a few injuries. We just didn't have anything go well this week.

My letters to Pat are apologies. I was the oldest. I should have been there for him.

Nonfiction that uses novelistic devices and strategies to shape the work. That's material that I really like.

My grandfather was a newspaper publisher and his paper had all the comics in NYC, so some of my earliest memories are of reading the family paper and heading straight for the comics insert.

Writing the book was itself a process of concealing and revealing.

When prose gets too stylized and out of control - and Stein is sometimes a good example - when you don't know what the hell is going on, then it's kind of boring.

What happened was that after I wrote The Ice Storm I had a period where I was blocked for a little bit, before I wrote Purple America.

What genre it falls under is only of interest later.

This is odd, but there are certain things that are really embarrassing to talk about - one is my job and the success that I've had in it, and the other is money.

They tell them to just keep walking north and don't look back. We've tried to apprehend some of these bandits.

It made it more personal and easier to talk.

I judged about a zillion awards this year so I've been reading a lot of books that just came out.

I'm trying to stay close to language first and foremost and make sure that the paragraphs sing, that it sounds like music to me.

But I think resolution is cheap and for lazy readers. Real life doesn't have that resolution. It's probably never going to be in my nature to deliver a proper ending.

I didn't know how to kill off a character unless I was able, as a narrator, to get really complicated. Because it was a big deal. I'd never killed a character before.

You don't have these perfectly transparent, simple thoughts. You have thoughts that are all cluttered up, like overused bookshelves.

The Diviners is such a big, woolly yarn, yet it's the fastest any book has come to me since The Ice Storm.

The Diviners ... an elusive, but surely huge, television saga ... that opens with Huns sweeping through Mongolia and closes with a Mormon diviner in the Las Vegas desert.

All the stuff that I used to treat with contempt - you know, I'm an artist, man, I don't do that family stuff - has begun to seem really important.

I suppose that the sympathetic/unsympathetic debate about characters sometimes feels to me like a misstatement of purpose. I always think of truly complex characters are falling between the cracks in that debate.

I'm not the guy to ask about the most up to date stuff.

Updike worked this way, and I just kinda borrowed it from him. So the memoir will be relief from novel writing for a moment.

In general, each form is a relief from the other forms. I can't write a novel after a novel. I just use up all the material each time, and I need to rest.

I always feel I have made unfilmable books. I even felt that way about a book of mine that was later made into a movie. But my wife, who has made two films, thinks this one would make a very original film. I'm all for original films.

I had a talk with the president of my publisher, and he averred that e-books are dropping off . So I wonder if the potential advantages are really going to happen as quickly as they ought.

I published a bunch of my older books in e-book format with Open Road, which is great and has tons of hard to find older books available there.

It turns out that my memory is just not that great, so for specific scenes with people doing stuff, sometimes I'd have the details all wrong or I couldn't remember what happened exactly, so I just let that be.

It's also true, however, that having conquered the regional writer ghetto, I am now intent on conquering the nationalist writer ghetto and moving out into the world more.

I'm trying to make sure that there's comedy as well as sadness. It makes the sadness more memorable.

I read a lot of The Canterbury Tales on my phone, because I was cycling between three different editions, and I needed to have a middle-of-the-night edition for the insomniac reading.

My contention is that that style is just as stylized as an ornate style.

I'm trying to read more dead people because I keep having to read stuff for juries and so forth.

So while it is true that I find really dark stuff funny sometimes, it's also true that as a writer of books I want to have the whole range of human emotions.

I sort of hate the novel when it doesn't push, restlessly, against the tradition and the traditional.

Have I mentioned that I expect death around every turn, that every blue sky has a safe sailing out of it, that every bus runs me over, that every low, mean syllable uttered in my direction seems to intimate the violence of murder, that every family seems like an opportunity for ruin and every marriage a ceremony into which calamity will fall and hearts will be broken and lives destroyed and people branded by the mortifications of love?

I believe in choosing the hardest book imaginable. I believe in reading up on what others have to say about this difficult book, and then making up my own mind.

There is no right or wrong reading of Naked Lunch, though some readings are more common, and thus Burroughs commercial is not the issue.

I am excited by Samantha Hunt. She's a writer I really admire a lot.

I believe that God locates himself at the spot where you recognize your own fallibility....And the paradox of it all has been that whenever I give up I seem to do better.

I suppose I should say that I treasure blasphemy, as a faith of the highest order.

I believe in the absolute and unlimited liberty of reading. I believe in wandering through the stacks and picking out the first thing that strikes me. I believe in choosing books based on the dust jacket.

Major theme of the book [ Hotels of North America], from my point of view: what is persona, what is self, in the digital sphere, and/or what is the effect of it on self in a prolonged interaction.

The Ice Storm, because of the movie, has had, or is to have, a vigorous life in other cultures.

I do think that just about whenever I am writing, or more accurately, whenever I have written, I feel better and more at peace as a human being. That doesn't mean, unfortunately, that the literary product is any good.

I am a better writer for having fewer demons, and I am more curious about the world and the people in it. So those of you thinking you might need your demons in order to be creative: I beg to differ.

I am in Boston right now, in fact, to do work at the New England Historical Genealogical Library, where I'm trying to finish up tracing my lineage back to the seventeenth century.

I made this list of stuff that it's time for me to try to do.

I have admired Melissa Pritchard's writing for several years now for its wisdom, its humble elegance, and its earthy comedy.

But that incessant drive to be out there in the literary universe that was important to me when I was in my twenties, like going to a Paris Review party or whatever, that seems totally irrelevant now.

Maybe when I'm sixty-five I'll talk about my literary life.

If I'm going to feel estranged and alienated and away from home I don't want anyone interrupting it to debate which berries to have in their pancakes.

Tangled in one another's arms and nine times out of ten the things you think about a person make it impossible to touch them.

Impotence, fetishism, bisexuality, and bondage are all facts of life, and our fiction should reflect that.

There’s something really rich and powerful in not talking about what you need to talk about sometimes.

I have sparred with commenters as a music writer (on The Rumpus, among other places, see e.g., my review about Taylor Swift), and that was plenty of training!

God howls with laughter at earthly plans, you know?

I love comic books and always did as a kid.

I always wanted to write something illustrated, and the Details strip finally gave me the opportunity.

The idea to make hotel reviews the form of the novel came first.So I just started writing hotel reviews and tried to come up with a consistent voice.

I don't know exactly how long the book as we know it will exist, but I fully expect to make it to my death without having to give up on books.

I turned forty, and Im finally going to get married and maybe have a kid.

The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.

The Great Recession is not imaginary, and the effects loom large. There was an article in the NYT about the galloping death rate among white men in middle age. Higher than among any other demographic, etc. Mostly death by drugs, alcohol, or suicide. Many of them rural. My feeling is that it's many people who haven't been able to get back into the work force. Reg Morse is an example of the problem.

I judged about a zillion awards this year so Ive been reading a lot of books that just came out.

I have worked really hard to defy categorization, to break down a taxonomy whenever it comes my way.

I think literature is best when it's voicing what we would prefer not to talk about.

I think first-person narrators should be complex, because otherwise the first-person is too shallow and predictable. I like a first-person narrator who can't totally be trusted.

Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.

The past was so past it hurt.

Cool is spent. Cool is empty. Cool is ex post facto. When advertisers and pundits hoard a word, you know it's time to retire from it. To move on. I want to suggest, therefore, that we begin to avoid cool now. Cool is a trick to get you to buy garments made by sweatshop laborers in Third World countries. Cool is the Triumph of the Will. Cool enables you to step over bodies. Cool enables you to look the other way. Cool makes you functional, eager for routine distraction, passive, doped, stupid.