Quotes from Rick Moody

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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