Rick Moody Quotes

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.

The past was so past it hurt.

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

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.

Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.

People tend to be scared of what they can't see.

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

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.

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.

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.

I love comic books and always did as a kid.

Updike worked this way, and I just kinda borrowed it from him. So the memoir will be relief from novel writing for a moment.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.