Rick Moody Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

Literature precedes genre.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

You don`t have these perfectly transparent, simple thoughts. You have thoughts that are all cluttered up, like overused bookshelves.

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

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

I love comic books and always did as a kid.

Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.

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

What happened was that after I wrote The Ice Storm I had a period where I was blocked for a little bit, before I wrote Purple America.

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

I can tell you all about the psychiatric hospital, but talking about the making of The Ice Storm movie... it makes me really uncomfortable.

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

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.

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.

What genre it falls under is only of interest later.

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.

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

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

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.

I`m trying to stay close to language first and foremost and make sure that the paragraphs sing, that it sounds like music to me.