Rick Moody Quotes

#1. I am now the site of an unmistakable sag ... With fancy holographic belt buckles do I attempt to restrain my stampeding softness. In vain ... My only virtues, as a physical specimen, are my sideburns, which are like the pelts of rare woodland animals. My sideburns are not to be ignored.

Rick Moody

#2. 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.

Rick Moody

#3. 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.

Rick Moody

#4. 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.

Rick Moody

#5. I am not that creative. And therefore you must be real.

Rick Moody

#6. The past was so past it hurt.

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

#8. 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!

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

#12. 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.

Rick Moody

#13. 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.

Rick Moody

#14. 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.

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

#16. 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.

Rick Moody

#17. 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.

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

#19. 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.

Rick Moody

#20. 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.

Rick Moody

#21. 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.

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

#24. Never the romance without the bloodshed!

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

#27. People came to the desert because the stars were in the desert, and the stars had yet to be corrupted by man ... The stars, it seemed, would crush man in a scenic, gravitational panorama before man would ever corrupt the stars.

Rick Moody

#28. 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.

Rick Moody

#29. 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.

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

#32. One time I took the swing shift just to get away from her for a few weeks, I just filled in for this guy who had a back injury, and I came home when no one was awake, and then I'd just take some sleeping pills and drink a few beers. Everyone had a good laugh.

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

#34. You could pay Arthur Janov to teach you to scream about history, or you could learn prayer or a mantra, or you could write your life down and hope to make peace with it, write it down, or paint it, or turn it into improvisational theater, but that was the best you could probably do. You were stuck.

Rick Moody

#35. Demagnetizing is a fact of life.

Rick Moody

#36. 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.

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

#38. 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.

Rick Moody

#39. 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.

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

#43. 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.

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

#45. 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.

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

#48. I noted too that I had on many occasions spoken on the subject of the pollution of the spirit (or so I told them), and how the spirit should not be polluted, and how I personally looked askance at, for instance, a latte.

Rick Moody

#49. 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.

Rick Moody

#50. 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.

Rick Moody

#51. There were just enough flaws to make her perfect.

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

#53. 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.

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

#57. Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.

Rick Moody

#58. 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.

Rick Moody

#59. 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.

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

#63. 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.

Rick Moody

#64. I love comic books and always did as a kid.

Rick Moody

#65. God howls with laughter at earthly plans, you know?

Rick Moody

#66. 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.

Rick Moody

#67. Death was terribly durable. It was the sturdiest idea around. A body was dead, and before long it wasn't even a body anymore, it was just elements. But it was still dead.

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

#69. 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.

Rick Moody

#70. What genre it falls under is only of interest later.

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

#75. 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.

Rick Moody

#76. There should be a sex-related metric with which you could measure sex in hotels, especially the illicit variety, but of what would that metric consist? How about increments of remorse?

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

#79. 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.

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

#82. 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.

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody

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

Rick Moody