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.

About Rick Moody

Hiram Frederick Moody IIIis an American novelist and short story writer best known for the 1994 novel The Ice Storm, a chronicle of the dissolution of two suburban Connecticut families over Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, which brought him widespread acclaim, became a bestseller, and was made into the film The Ice Storm. Many of his works have been praised by fellow writers and critics alike.

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More quotes from Rick Moody

I judged about a zillion awards this year so I’ve been reading a lot of books that just came out.

Rick Moody

American fiction writer

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.

Rick Moody

American fiction writer

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.

Rick Moody

American fiction writer

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.

Rick Moody

American fiction writer

What genre it falls under is only of interest later.

Rick Moody

American fiction writer

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

Rick Moody

American fiction writer

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.

Rick Moody

American fiction writer

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

Rick Moody

American fiction writer

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

Rick Moody

American fiction writer

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

Rick Moody

American fiction writer

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

American fiction writer

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

Rick Moody

American fiction writer

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

American fiction writer

Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.

Rick Moody

American fiction writer

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

Rick Moody

American fiction writer

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

American fiction writer

Literature precedes genre.

Rick Moody

American fiction writer

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

Rick Moody

American fiction writer

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

American fiction writer

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

Rick Moody

American fiction writer

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

Rick Moody

American fiction writer

I love comic books and always did as a kid.

Rick Moody

American fiction writer

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

Rick Moody

American fiction writer

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

Rick Moody

American fiction writer

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

American fiction writer

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

Rick Moody

American fiction writer

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

Rick Moody

American fiction writer

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

Rick Moody

American fiction writer

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.

Rick Moody

American fiction writer

The point is to balance on the edge between musicality and content.

Rick Moody

American fiction writer