Rick Moody Quotes (40 Quotes)


    I love comic books and always did as a kid.

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

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

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

    I can tell you all about the psychiatric hospital, but talking about the making of The Ice Storm movie... it makes me really uncomfortable.


    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.

    Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.

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

    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.

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

    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.

    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.

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

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

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

    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.

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

    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.

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

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

    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.

    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.

    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.

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

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

    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.

    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.

    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.

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

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

    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.

    What genre it falls under is only of interest later.

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

    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.

    If you are a lover of the carefully crafted sentence, if more isn't enough ... the worst writer of his generation.


    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.

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

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


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