Rick Moody famous quotes

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

#Country #Stupid #Moving

The past was so past it hurt.
-- Rick Moody

#Hurt #Past #It Hurts

I think literature is best when it's voicing what we would prefer not to talk about.
-- Rick Moody

#Thinking #Literature

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

#Taxonomy #Way #Breaking Down

I judged about a zillion awards this year so Ive been reading a lot of books that just came out.
-- Rick Moody

#Book #Reading #Years

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

#Personality #Trying #Process

I turned forty, and Im finally going to get married and maybe have a kid.
-- Rick Moody

#Kids #Married #Forty

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

#Reading #Lunch #Issues

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

#Memories #People #Details

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

#Writing #Opportunity #Details

I love comic books and always did as a kid.
-- Rick Moody

#Book #Kids #Comic Book

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

#Book #Reading #Believe

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

#Hockey #Ice #Other Cultures

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

#Facts #Fiction #Bondage

Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem.
-- Rick Moody

#Bookstores #Problem #Genre

Maybe when I'm sixty-five I'll talk about my literary life.
-- Rick Moody

#Sixty

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

#Party #Paris #Important

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

#Humble #Writing #Years

I made this list of stuff that it's time for me to try to do.
-- Rick Moody

#Trying #Stuff #Lists

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

#Boston #Historical #Trying

I'm trying to make sure that there's comedy as well as sadness. It makes the sadness more memorable.
-- Rick Moody

#Sad #Memorable #Trying

My contention is that that style is just as stylized as an ornate style.
-- Rick Moody

#Style #Contention

God howls with laughter at earthly plans, you know?
-- Rick Moody

#Laughter #Howl #Plans

There’s something really rich and powerful in not talking about what you need to talk about sometimes.
-- Rick Moody

#Powerful #Talking #Needs

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

#Order #Treasure #Should

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.
-- Rick Moody

#Spiritual #Giving Up #Believe

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

#Love #Running #Fall

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

#Thinking #Tangled #Nine

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

#Moving On #Ghetto #World

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

#Book #Dark #Want

I'm trying to read more dead people because I keep having to read stuff for juries and so forth.
-- Rick Moody

#People #Trying #Stuff

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

#Believe #Book #Reading