Quotes from Rick Moody

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.

God howls with laughter at earthly plans, you know?

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.

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

if only she hadn't agreed to wear the pink pajamas there in the Mercer Hotel. Because once I saw her in them, I loved her in the same way I love my sister, which is an impasse of the truly impassable sort. ????

Which man among us is not, most of the time, possessed of the desire to curl himself into a foetal ball?

There are men who need to defile themselves in order to get on with their lives.

Would ectoplasm be considered an amenity? As I have said, I personally define an amenity as a specific and unexpected add-on to the hotel experience.

The middle is the longest in any story, and therefore the time with the most desperation.

A bed is where a sense of shared purpose first takes root.

I noted too that I had on many occasions spoken on the subject of the pollution of the spirit (or so I told them), and how the spirit should not be polluted, and how I personally looked askance at, for instance, a latte.

And so I replied, "You just don't know the right kind of motivational speakers!" And she: "Top answer! Top answer!" ??? (Posted 3/3/2012)

He was a psychologist, and degrees in psychology, I find, often conceal deviant tendencies.

Maybe it was more than this. Maybe the bond that forms between people doesn't get unmade so easily. Maybe it leaves its mark for a long time.

As you may have noticed, here we were living in a Swedish car in the parking lot of a Swedish mega-retailer. ??

There should be a sex-related metric with which you could measure sex in hotels, especially the illicit variety, but of what would that metric consist? How about increments of remorse?

Linda cranked the greatest hits of heartbreak and we sat down on the carpeted floor to listen. I missed you.

Isn't a tangle of limbs a glorious thing to behold? Don't you wish to be in a tangle of limbs?

I was bent on love the way a crow is bent on a flattened squirrel.

There were just enough flaws to make her perfect.

Demagnetizing is a fact of life.

What was boring was somehow more elegant, more perfect, for it was incontrovertible. The boring was everything that certainly was. The boring was everything that had stood the test of time. The boring was that set of truths that were so long fixed that erosion had begun to sand them down. The boring was geological; the boring was universal. The boring, therefore, was preferable.

A kiss, she thinks, has to be entirely balanced — it has to have a little conflict, a little dialectic, a little revolution.

The desert of Central California was in those days a lot like Mongolia.