Top 69 Quotes & Sayings by Rick Moody

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Literature precedes genre.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 love comic books and always did as a kid.

Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.

What genre it falls under is only of interest later.

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

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

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

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.

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

People know that pain is part of our nature, that it cannot be avoided and that it should not be avoided. But capitalism in this country is focused on the idea 1) that life can and should be absolutely beautiful; 2) that beauty can be defined according to an ironclad objective standard; 3) that beauty can be held onto forever if only you do the right things perfectly enough; and 4) that it can be purchased.

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

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

Capitalism, in the realm of sexuality, I figure, thinks that we behave in specific ways, like a breast is always going to produce a hard-on for some product, whereas the truth is that sexuality is always a continuum, which can be characterized by reversals.

Sadness is simply something to be treated with antidepressant meds and otherwise need not be spoken of.

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!

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.

My suspicion is that this is an unavoidable human dilemma, that people will always want to avoid pain, to avoid those who are in pain, and so will be vulnerable to anyone or anything that seems to promise permanent avoidance.

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.

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

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

The past was so past it hurt.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

God howls with laughter at earthly plans, you know?

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.

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?

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.

People tend to be scared of what they can't see.

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