Rick Moody Quotes

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

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

Which man among us is not, most of the time, possessed of the desire to curl himself into a foetal ball?

The thing you did to alleviate the loneliness was to take off your clothes and touch someone, even if you didn't really know the person well.

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

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

There are men who need to defile themselves in order to get on with their lives.

Would ectoplasm be considered an amenity? As I have said, I personally define an amenity as a specific and unexpected add-on to the hotel experience.

The middle is the longest in any story, and therefore the time with the most desperation.

Maybe it was more than this. Maybe the bond that forms between people doesn't get unmade so easily. Maybe it leaves its mark for a long time.

Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.

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

What genre it falls under is only of interest later.

Fucking family. Feeble and forlorn and floundering and foolish and frustrating and functional and sad, sad. Fucking family. Fiend or foe.

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

Normally, I am a little insecure about myself without a shirt on, as my days of being attractive are now behind me.

(He was a psychologist, and degrees in psychology, I find, often conceal deviant tendencies.

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

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

Linda cranked the greatest hits of heartbreak and we sat down on the carpeted floor to listen. I missed you.

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

There were just enough flaws to make her perfect.

The sounds of southwestern cacti are broadcast for several weeks until, by general assent, it is agreed that cacti make no sounds.

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

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.

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

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

[I]t is things that make us happy when conversation begins to reveal itself as a paltry substitute.

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

Never the romance without the bloodshed!

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

He seemed as though he were habitually preparing himself for something awful, and this was justified because many awful things had happened to him.

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 am not that creative. And therefore you must be real.

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

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

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

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

The past was so past it hurt.

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.

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

If God had designed the orchestra, then the cello was His greatest accomplishment.

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

Isn't a tangle of limbs a glorious thing to behold? Don't you wish to be in a tangle of limbs?

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

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

I was bent on love the way a crow is bent on a flattened squirrel.

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.

A bed is where a sense of shared purpose first takes root.

Demagnetizing is a fact of life.

God howls with laughter at earthly plans, you know?

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

I love comic books and always did as a kid.

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