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.
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.
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.
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.
American fiction writer
What genre it falls under is only of interest later.
American fiction writer
Maybe when I’m sixty-five I’ll talk about my literary life.
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.
American fiction writer
I always wanted to write something illustrated, and the Details strip finally gave me the opportunity.
American fiction writer
My contention is that that style is just as stylized as an ornate style.
American fiction writer
Nonfiction that uses novelistic devices and strategies to shape the work. That’s material that I really like.
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.
American fiction writer
I suppose I should say that I treasure blasphemy, as a faith of the highest order.
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.
American fiction writer
Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.
American fiction writer
Impotence, fetishism, bisexuality, and bondage are all facts of life, and our fiction should reflect that.
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.
American fiction writer
Literature precedes genre.
American fiction writer
The Ice Storm, because of the movie, has had, or is to have, a vigorous life in other cultures.
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.
American fiction writer
I’m trying to read more dead people because I keep having to read stuff for juries and so forth.
American fiction writer
Writing the book was itself a process of concealing and revealing.
American fiction writer
I love comic books and always did as a kid.
American fiction writer
I have worked really hard to defy categorization, to break down a taxonomy whenever it comes my way.
American fiction writer
The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.
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.
American fiction writer
I turned forty, and I’m finally going to get married and maybe have a kid.
American fiction writer
I’m trying to make sure that there’s comedy as well as sadness. It makes the sadness more memorable.
American fiction writer
I made this list of stuff that it’s time for me to try to do.
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.
American fiction writer
The point is to balance on the edge between musicality and content.
American fiction writer