Rick Moody Quotes & Sayings

We went back to the hotel to take our clothes off immediately, as though this were our only purpose, and I recollect that this was about loneliness, as far as I was concerned. 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. I could just as easily have asked her to let me lie down on top of her fully clothed on a couch in the lobby of the Hampton Inn and Suites, but I didn't know that then. I thought I was supposed to take off my clothes, and I wanted her to take off her clothes, and somehow this seemed a foregone conclusion, perhaps because each of us had started with no face and no body, as a condition of modern life, and now we were here and we wanted to celebrate the fact that we were not hideous, not entirely, and we were in the flesh. — Rick Moody

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What genre it falls under is only of interest later. — Rick Moody

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

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

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

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

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

My contention is that that style is just as stylized as an ornate style. — Rick Moody

Words are the oldest information storage and retrieval system ever devised. Words are probably older than the cave paintings in France, words have been here for tens of thousands of years longer than film, moving pictures, video, and digital video, and words will likely be here after those media too. When the electromagnetic pulse comes in the wake of the nuclear blast? Those computers and digital video cameras and videotape recorders that are not melted outright will be plastic and metal husks used to prop open doors. Not so with the utterances of tongues. Words will remain, and the highly complicated and idiosyncratic accounts assembled from them will provide us with the dark news about the blast. The written word will remain, scribbled on collapsed highway overpasses, as a testament to love and rage, as evidence of the wanderers in the ruin. — Rick Moody

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

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

I am not that creative. And therefore you must be real. — Rick Moody

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

The Great Recession is not imaginary, and the effects loom large. There was an article in the NYT about the galloping death rate among white men in middle age. Higher than among any other demographic, etc. Mostly death by drugs, alcohol, or suicide. Many of them rural. My feeling is that it's many people who haven't been able to get back into the work force. Reg Morse is an example of the problem. — Rick Moody

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

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

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

My idea of literature, as I have often said, is that it should save lives. My idea of literature is that it once did save lives, and was of consequence in that way. I believe it can do so again. With every book, to the best of my ability, I try to put this belief in action, even if, as in some of the recent books, the best way to save lives is to cause laughter. Bring on your problems, and I will listen, and bear witness, and when the occasion permits, I will respond, according to certain general rules, on this page, in this hope that here too words may be redemptive. — Rick Moody

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

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

God howls with laughter at earthly plans, you know? — Rick Moody

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

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? — Rick Moody

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

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

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

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

What was boring was somehow more elegant, more perfect, for it was incontrovertible. The boring was everything that certainly was. The boring was everything that had stood the test of time. The boring was that set of truths that were so long fixed that erosion had begun to sand them down. The boring was geological; the boring was universal. The boring, therefore, was preferable. — Rick Moody

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem. — Rick Moody

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

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

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

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

The past was so past it hurt. — Rick Moody

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was monks who first taught the art of reading in silence. During the Dark Ages. Augustine, perhaps, was first. And silence was a tongue Elena understood. Silence was her idiom for support and caring. Silence was permissive and contemplative and nonconfrontational and there was melody to it. It was both earth and ether. — Rick Moody

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

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

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

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

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. — Rick Moody

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My model, such as it is, is a mentorship model, which is to say that I care personally, and I involve myself personally/emotionally with the work of each student, and I try to make it such that they want to reach for more, do better, risk more, try new things, abandon limited objectives, individuate, and so on. For me it is personal, to the best of my ability, and it is about making more of the writer and of the writer's task in each case. I also think it's possible to do this, to teach in this way, in a classroom free of rancor and backbiting and competitive jostling. So: my class should be a place of peace, a place where anything is possible, where the code of realism is in disrepute, and the worst thing you can say, the absolutely verboten thing, is the phrase: The New Yorker. — Rick Moody

It was as if the entire day, the entire vacation even, were leading up to a single moment. he felt certain then that stan lee was in some direct communication with the universe - in a way, say, that the watcher, the most mysterious marvel character, was content like some gnostic entity merely to know of machinations of creation - and that through lee's spiritually advanced vision, paul's own destiny was entrapped in the monthly serializations of these kitschy superheroes. he seemed both influenced and influencer in the world of marvel. — Rick Moody

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

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

What kind of woman was she? What kind of woman was it who called to me from that calamity on the Seventh Avenue line? What kind of woman do I love now, with a fealty that will not cease, not till my occluded arteries send their clots up to the spongy interiors in my skull and I go mute and slack? I love the kind of woman whose hair has gone gray in a not terribly flattering way, the kind who doesn't even notice how she has to keeps having to buy larger jeans, the kind who likes big cars because she doesn't like to be uncomfortable. I love this woman because she is gifted with astounding premonitory skills: no matter how uncertain, how despondent, how lost her mate feels, no matter how dire the circumstances, she nonetheless predicts that Everything will be roses. — Rick Moody

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

Never the romance without the bloodshed! — Rick Moody

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

There were just enough flaws to make her perfect. — Rick Moody

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

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

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

Demagnetizing is a fact of life. — Rick Moody

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

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

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

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

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

I love comic books and always did as a kid. — Rick Moody

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

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