Top 50 Rick Moody Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

3. “Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.”

— Rick Moody

4. “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.”

— Rick Moody

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

— Rick Moody

6. “If God had designed the orchestra, then the cello was His greatest accomplishment.”

— Rick Moody

7. “I am excited by Samantha Hunt. She’s a writer I really admire a lot.”

— Rick Moody

8. “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

9. “My contention is that that style is just as stylized as an ornate style.”

— Rick Moody

10. “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

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

— Rick Moody

12. “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

13. “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

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

— Rick Moody

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

— Rick Moody

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “I think literature is best when it’s voicing what we would prefer not to talk about.”

— Rick Moody

20. “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

21. “Never the romance without the bloodshed!”

— Rick Moody

Featured in: Romance Quotes

22. “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

23. “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

24. “I love comic books and always did as a kid.”

— Rick Moody

25. “Maybe when I’m sixty-five I’ll talk about my literary life.”

— Rick Moody

26. “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

27. “I am not that creative. And therefore you must be real.”

— Rick Moody

28. “I’m trying to read more dead people because I keep having to read stuff for juries and so forth.”

— Rick Moody

29. “Normally, I am a little insecure about myself without a shirt on, as my days of being attractive are now behind me.”

— Rick Moody

30. “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

31. “I turned forty, and Im finally going to get married and maybe have a kid.”

— Rick Moody

32. “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

33. “I sort of hate the novel when it doesn’t push, restlessly, against the tradition and the traditional.”

— Rick Moody

34. “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

35. “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

36. “I judged about a zillion awards this year so Ive been reading a lot of books that just came out.”

— Rick Moody

37. “I have admired Melissa Pritchard’s writing for several years now for its wisdom, its humble elegance, and its earthy comedy.”

— Rick Moody

38. “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

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

— Rick Moody

40. “I made this list of stuff that it’s time for me to try to do.”

— Rick Moody

41. “God howls with laughter at earthly plans, you know?”

— Rick Moody

42. “I always wanted to write something illustrated, and the Details strip finally gave me the opportunity.”

— Rick Moody

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

— Rick Moody

44. “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

45. “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

46. “There’s something really rich and powerful in not talking about what you need to talk about sometimes.”

— Rick Moody

47. “The past was so past it hurt.”

— Rick Moody

48. “I’m not the guy to ask about the most up to date stuff.”

— Rick Moody

49. “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

50. “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