Rick Moody Quotes

It's all about letting the story take over.

The basic quality that any great story must have is a story that illustrates the human condition.

I like stories where there's a center that's mushy and complicated.

When you find you don't like a character, you just type four letters and he's dead.

The more limitations you put on a character, often times the better a character you'll make them, the more interesting the story becomes because the character can't simply wave a hand and make something happen. They have to work within the framework.

There is no better place to plot the death of a character than when you're miserable and working out.

It has always been something I could do, and it may seem odd that in my case I seem to create an interesting narrative and frustrate the reader's opportunities to follow it at every step.

What I have to outline is action and plot because I'm not particularly good at that.

I know now why I stopped writing short stories. It was at the point when I recognised how difficult they were.

A strong story can move me to tears, and it doesn't matter whether it's a science-fiction or fantasy world. It's about what happens to a person, the choices they make. That's what's interesting.

I think I'm good at metaphors and descriptions. Plot doesn't come naturally to me, so I work really hard at it.

For novelists, sharply drawn moral conflicts are often useful, and even human and personal disasters can be seen as material.

If I'm practicing making up what the characters will do, it's never good. In fact, when I catch myself doing that, I try to get rid of that section, and try and let them start making the decisions.

A lot of the struggle I had with movies is I really loved moments and tones and feelings in a scene, and I loved creating those, but I never really had great stories to string them together.

I usually give a book 40 pages. If it doesn't grab me by then, adios. With young adult books, you can usually tell by Page 4 if it's worth the time. The author establishes the conflict early, sometimes in the first sentence. The themes of hope, family, friendship and overcoming hardship appeal to most everyone.

I have always argued, in a good novel, interesting things happen to interesting people.

I'm a strange kind of author - I like assignments. I wasn't clever enough to invent an iconic figure like Salander, but she's my kind of girl.

I think one of the successes of Gladiator is how we manage to turn on a dime the character from one thing to another where you believe he is one thing and he is something very different.

This is the story, this is your character, I have the sense of the landscape, I have the sense of the scene, I have all that stuff. But I'm also looking for something else to happen, an accident or something. You're focused on the story you intend to tell and then you have to have a peripheral net out to catch these accidents.

Any show I'm working on, I want the stories to always be about something, and to have the potential to be emotional. That's the kind of story that I like.

As a novelist, I'm endlessly fascinated by human behavior and interactions.

A friend of mine who is in the publishing business knew I was writing a book, and he said, 'Have you said anything yet about the good guy? Because I know you spend so much time with the bad guys.' Because they're fun. So then you have to make the good guy fun, in order to compete. That's the challenge.

I started as a playwright. Any sort of scriptwriting you do helps you hone your story. You have the same demands of creating a plot, developing relatable characters and keeping your audience invested in your story. My books are basically structured like three-act plays.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

If you know exactly what your character knows, it's a drama.