Top 18 Rick Moody Quotes

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.

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 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.

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

Literature precedes genre.

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.

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.

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

I love comic books and always did as a kid.

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.

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

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

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