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