Top 243 Quotes & Sayings by Christopher Moore

I was baptized Methodist, but I was mainly raised First Church of NFL, which is to say that my family, especially my father, was much more concerned with watching football on Sundays than attending services.

The fact that 'A Dirty Job' has comedy and supernatural horror in it, that both are woven in and out of it with a whimsical tone, despite the fact that it's about death, makes it hard to characterize with standard genre labels - but I have no problem with that. I'd call it a funny story about death, and leave it at that.

I've made a dog's breakfast of English history, geography, 'King Lear,' and the English language in general.

San Francisco is a breathtakingly beautiful city, with lots of great contrasts between dark and light, often overlapping each other. It's a great setting for a horror story.

You can't teach someone to be funny, but you can teach comic timing. If you listen to a good comic, you can learn how to put it on a page.

I kind of dislike 'For Whom the Bell Tolls,' but most of Hemingway in general, mainly because his stylistic shenanigans ruined so many young writers of my generation who tried to imitate him. I think, for his time, he moved fiction to a different level stylistically, or at least added to the dialogue, but in our time, he's annoying.

I think beta males on an evolutionary basis are much more successful than the alpha males are. You don't hear much about us, but there's a lot more of us out there.

I'm not nearly as outrageously brave as many of my rascals that I write. But I think the rascal spirit must reside in me somewhere.

I love British cursing - the cadence of it, the joy in the sound of the words, and the vulgarity of it.

I just finished a novel called 'Exult,' by Joe Quirk, last night. It's about hang gliding. I liked his first book, too, 'The Ultimate Rush.' I now know that I never, ever, ever want to go hang gliding, so that's good.

I've sort of made a reputation by high-stepping my way out of genre. As soon as somebody says, 'He does this,' I'm not standing there anymore.

The only thing that matters to me about my stories is that they're entertaining and they're funny. And I tend to get bored easily, so I generally throw something supernatural in. I would say they're humorous novels that have a supernatural bent, but that's as close as you're going to get to fitting them all in the same basket.

One thing that's really delightful is my books tend to attract people who are funny, so I get the benefit of people writing me with things that crack me up.

My fans have great senses of humor and eat too much chocolate.

As Richard Pryor was to Eddie Murphy, that's what Kurt Vonnegut was to me.

I can't write a book like 'Lamb' or 'Fool' every year. It just takes too much research and craft.

As much as I encourage communication with my readers, I don't want reviews from them, simply because I don't need to be hamstrung in the middle of working on something.

I really don't think of my work in terms of a genre. I think of it in terms of what I want to say, what I think is cool, and what I'm good at.

When I teach seminars, I tell people, 'Your stuff has to look like something that's out there, because otherwise nobody will take a chance on you.'

When you go on book tour, you're always talking about yourself and your book from the time you get up in the morning until you go out at night. You, you. You get really sick of yourself.

As an author, you spend a lot of time by yourself in a room making clicky noises. It gets pretty insulated. You realize pretty early on in your career that even if this goes well, you could spend all your life in a room alone. Unless you pick projects that are going to get you out doing things, you're not going to actually live your life.

You know, a vampire book is not a book to be the vehicle for big themes and stuff, where sometimes when you're dealing with art or the life of Christ or the oeuvre of Shakespeare, you know, it's a little more ambitious.

When you're telling stories, you are actually trying to illuminate some portion of the truth in an artful way. The story may immediately seem to be a lie, but it's like an impressionistic painting - you see the light and the color better than you would with a photo-realistic piece.

The reason I wrote 'You Suck' was that I so enjoyed spending time with Tommy and Jody.

I'm not afraid of getting into a subject I don't know much about.

When I was writing 'You Suck,' in 2006, I constructed the diction of the book's narrator, perky Goth girl Abby Normal, from what I read on Goth blog sites.

Everything in Venice is just a little bit creepy, as much as it's beautiful.

Like most people, I woke up one day to find that everyone I knew was taking antidepressants, and since I wasn't, I figured that I must be the cause of their depression.

I don't read reviews if I know in advance they're negative, because I can't have my confidence undermined when I'm writing.

For me, 'Lamb' started out as a further exploration of the phenomenon of faith and the responsibility of a messiah that I touched on in 'Coyote Blue' and 'Island of the Sequined Love Nun,' but it ended up being an exploration of the true meaning of sacrifice, loyalty, and friendship.

The reason I'm writing funny books is that I wish there were more.

I thought I was going to be a horror story writer. My influences were horror writers, like Rich Matheson, Ray Bradbury and Bram Stoker.

All of the trickster, rascal characters that I write have the voice I aspire to. In real life, you can't be that obnoxious and get away with it.

I don't give a toss about being remembered after my death.

From Dickens's cockneys to Salinger's phonies, from Kerouac's beatniks to Cheech and Chong's freaks, and on to hip hop's homies, dialect has always been used as a way for generations to distinguish themselves.

I have that special sort of novelist body of knowledge which is extraordinarily wide and very, very shallow. So I can usually answer the questions on 'Jeopardy,' but never the bonus question.

What is your name?" asked Lear. Caius," said Kent. And whence do you hail?" From Bonking, sire." Well, yes, lad, as do we all," said Lear, "but from what town?

Oh, we are but soft and squishy bags of mortality rolling in a bin of sharp circumstance, leaking life until we collapse, flaccid, into our own despair.

Oh, I would while away the hours, Wanking in the flowers, my heart all full of song, I'd be gliding all the lilies as I waved about my willie, If I only had a schlong.

If you think anyone is sane you just don’t know enough about them. The key — and this is very relevant in our case — is to find someone whose insanity dovetails with your own.

An adventure story is fear recalled in comfort.

Unless you can change the past, you’re wasting the present on this guilt

You think you know how this story is going to end, but you don't.

Canada is a myth people made up to entertain children, like the Tooth Fairy. There’s no such place.

The Angel Gabriel disappeared once for sixty years and they found him on earth hiding in the body of a man named Miles Davis.

Nobody's perfect... Well, there was this one guy, but we killed him.

Why understand when you can believe?

Sometimes this high-tech world calls for low-tech solutions.

Life is loneliness, broken only by the gods taunting us with friendship and the odd bonk

Love needs room to grow. Like a rose. Or a tumor.

If you think anyone is sane you just don't know enough about them.

And an inky-colored despair of rejection enveloped me like the black tortilla of depression around a pain burrito.

They want to be tied up, I tie them up. They want to be spanked, I spank them. They want to be called names, I call them names. But try and drink a little of their blood, and they scream like babies. What about my needs?

He loved constantly, instantly, spontaneously, without thought or words. That's what he taught me. Love is not something you think about, it is a state in which you dwell. That was his gift.

It's wildly irritating to have invented something as revolutionary as sarcasm, only to have it abused by amateurs.

Turtles hate heights. They don't even like being a few feet off the ground. It's the main reason they have resisted evolution for so long-fear of heights. Turtle thinking goes thus: Sure, first our scales turn into feathers and the next thing you know we're flying and chirping and perching on trees. We've seen it happen. Thanks, but we're staying right here in the mud where we belong. You're not going to see us flying full-tilt boogie into a sliding glass door.

I was seven before I realized that you could eat breakfast with your pants on.

Children see magic because they look for it.

Blessed are the dumbfucks.

Regardless of its purpose, the humpback-whale song is the most complex piece of nonhuman composition on earth. Whether it's art, prayer, or booty call, the humpback song is an amazing thing to experience firsthand, and I suspect that even once the science of it is put to bed, it will remain, as long as they sing, magic.