Quotes by Rick Moody

• I turned forty, and I'm finally going to get married and maybe have a kid.
• 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.
• Writing the book was itself a process of concealing and revealing.
• 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.
• What genre it falls under is only of interest later.
• 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.
• The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.
• The point is to balance on the edge between musicality and content.
• The Ice Storm, because of the movie, has had, or is to have, a vigorous life in other cultures.
• 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.
• Nonfiction that uses novelistic devices and strategies to shape the work. That's material that I really like.
• 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.
• My contention is that that style is just as stylized as an ornate style.
• I made this list of stuff that it's time for me to try to do.
• Literature precedes genre.
• I judged about a zillion awards this year so I've been reading a lot of books that just came out.
• Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.
• I always wanted to write something illustrated, and the Details strip finally gave me the opportunity.
• 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.
• Maybe when I'm sixty-five I'll talk about my literary life.
• I have worked really hard to defy categorization, to break down a taxonomy whenever it comes my way.
• 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.
• I suppose I should say that I treasure blasphemy, as a faith of the highest order.
• I'm trying to make sure that there's comedy as well as sadness. It makes the sadness more memorable.
• I'm trying to read more dead people because I keep having to read stuff for juries and so forth.
• Impotence, fetishism, bisexuality, and bondage are all facts of life, and our fiction should reflect that.
• 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 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.