Rick Moody Quotes

I want to tell you what it was really like to think death is imminent, but I can't. It's a taste in your mouth. And an emptiness.

Death has always had a prominent place in my mind. There are times when I think somebody might kill me.

My heart pounds sickeningly and I turn pale... I often feel as if I were dead... I seem to be losing my mind.

"Can't sleep with a dead man in my closet." "You killed someone?" asked Ben with interest.

Why should I be afraid now? Strange men have come to kill me ever since I was twelve years old.

A man who thinks that death is against life can never be non-violent. It is impossible. A man who thinks that death is the enemy can never be at ease, at home. That is impossible. How can you be at ease when the enemy is waiting for you any moment? It will jump on you and destroy you. How can you be non-tense when death is waiting just around the corner and the shadow of death is always falling on you? It can happen any moment. How can you rest when death is there? How can you relax? The enemy won't allow you to relax.

Columbine was so frightening. And the media took off with it, like everything else, so it instilled more fear in people. You're looking around at school for kids like the ones who committed the shootings, and you feel wrong for doing that, you know?

Fear is a terrible thing. It makes you do awful things.

While there's life, there's fear.

My fears are agitated to an extreme degree and the dread of death involves me in a stupor of chilling indisposition.

If I leave, reality will devour me. Then they will all really be dead.

I'm terrified I'm about to die, or that all the people I love are about to die, every second of every day.

Once you realise that heroes die, everything becomes that much more terrifying.

At night when I used to sleep, I was thinking all the time that shall I put a knife under my pillow.

For me, at least, Vietnam was partly love. With each step, each light-year of a second, a foot soldier is always almost dead, or so it feels, and in such circumstances, you can't help but love.

I felt like a hunted animal, followed constantly, waiting to be killed.

I love driving, but sometimes, I'm not too good at it because I spend too much time looking in the rearview mirror if I know I'm being followed. You don't respond like, 'Oh, there's paparazzi.' It's more like, 'There's a man, and he's going to attack me.' That's how your body responds.

Now I'm starting to jog. But every time I do jog I have 9-1 pressed into my phone, with the next '1' ready to be launched in case I drop.

There's horror in your life, believe me, whether it's coming, or you've just been lucky to miss it today.

When I was in my early forties, I slept with a loaded gun under my bed. I'd become severely depressed in my thirties, and for almost a decade I spiraled down into paranoia, rage, self-loathing, and thoughts of suicide.

My mother was killed in a plane crash, so I hate travelling in planes. Death is so unexpected. I would actually rather stay at home and not go anywhere.

After I was assaulted in Egypt, I learned fear. I've just never been so scared in my life. I've never been so close to death.

My dark secrets are life threatening. Pockets of unhappiness set in aspic that build and build. I have this primitive feeling that if something good happens, it is going to be followed by something bad. There is always a price to pay.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

I have an irrational fear that I'm going to have a gruesome and untimely death because so many wonderful things are happening to me.