Rick Moody
Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.
Impotence, fetishism, bisexuality, and bondage are all facts of life, and our fiction should reflect that.
Nonfiction that uses novelistic devices and strategies to shape the work. That's material that I really like.
Literature precedes genre.
What genre it falls under is only of interest later.
Writing the book was itself a process of concealing and revealing.
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.
Maybe when I'm sixty-five I'll talk about my literary life.
I turned forty, and I'm finally going to get married and maybe have 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.
The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.
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.
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 make sure that there's comedy as well as sadness. It makes the sadness more memorable.
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.
My contention is that that style is just as stylized as an ornate style.
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.
The point is to balance on the edge between musicality and content.
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 made this list of stuff that it's time for me to try to do.
I judged about a zillion awards this year so I've been reading a lot of books that just came out.
I'm trying to read more dead people because I keep having to read stuff for juries and so forth.
I have worked really hard to defy categorization, to break down a taxonomy whenever it comes my way.
I suppose I should say that I treasure blasphemy, as a faith of the highest order.
The Ice Storm, because of the movie, has had, or is to have, a vigorous life in other cultures.
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 love comic books and always did as a kid.
I always wanted to write something illustrated, and the Details strip finally gave me the opportunity.
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.
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.
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.Collection: Country
The past was so past it hurt.Collection: Hurt
I think literature is best when it's voicing what we would prefer not to talk about.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Thinking
People tend to be scared of what they can't see.Collection: People
I think people on antidepressants often lose sexual feelings. I don't mean that I think sex is only about sadness; it is obviously about joy and vitality and birth as well.Collection: Sadness
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.Collection: Giving Up
Capitalism, in the realm of sexuality, I figure, thinks that we behave in specific ways, like a breast is always going to produce a hard-on for some product, whereas the truth is that sexuality is always a continuum, which can be characterized by reversals.Collection: Thinking
I am excited by... the new novel by Samantha Hunt. She's a writer I really admire a lot.Collection: Excited
I believe in the absolute and unlimited liberty of reading. I believe in wandering through the stacks and picking out the first thing that strikes me. I believe in choosing books based on the dust jacket.Collection: Book
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!Collection: Training
Updike worked this way, and I just kinda borrowed it from him. So the memoir will be relief from novel writing for a moment.Collection: Writing
I read a lot of 'The Canterbury Tales' on my phone last year, because I was cycling between three different editions, and I needed to have a middle-of-the-night edition for the insomniac reading.Collection: Reading
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.Collection: Thinking
I sort of hate the novel when it doesn't push, restlessly, against the tradition and the traditional.Collection: Hate
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Spiritual
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Writing
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?Collection: Love