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Quotations by Rick Moody 30 Found Born: Wednesday, October 18, 1961 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. 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. Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem. I always wanted to write something illustrated, and the Details strip finally gave me the opportunity. 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. 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 worked really hard to defy categorization, to break down a taxonomy whenever it comes my way. I judged about a zillion awards this year so I've been reading a lot of books that just came out. I love comic books and always did as a kid. I made this list of stuff that it's time for me to try to do. I suppose I should say that I treasure blasphemy, as a faith of the highest order. I turned forty, and I'm finally going to get married and maybe have a kid. I'm trying to make sure that there's comedy as well as sadness. It makes the sadness more memorable. I'm trying to read more dead people because I keep having to read stuff for juries and so forth. Impotence, fetishism, bisexuality, and bondage are all facts of life, and our fiction should reflect that. 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. 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. Literature precedes genre. Maybe when I'm sixty-five I'll talk about my literary life. My contention is that that style is just as stylized as an ornate style. 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. Nonfiction that uses novelistic devices and strategies to shape the work. That's material that I really like. 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. The Ice Storm, because of the movie, has had, or is to have, a vigorous life in other cultures. The point is to balance on the edge between musicality and content. The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality. 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. What genre it falls under is only of interest later. 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. Writing the book was itself a process of concealing and revealing. |
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