Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes

The language fictional characters use is chosen for effect, at least if the author is concentrating.

In my own writing, I think of myself as a realist who exaggerates a little.

I think every first-person narrator in a novel should be compromised. I prefer that word to 'unreliable.'

First person allows deeper insight into the protagonist's character. It allows the reader to identify more fully with the protagonist and to share her world quite intimately. So it suits a story focused on one character's personal journey. However, first person shuts out insights into other characters.

The universal narrator knows all and can enter a character's head any time he chooses.

One of the strategies for doing first-person is to make the narrator very knowing, so that the reader is with somebody who has a take on everything they observe.

I was thinking about the generation before us, like John Barth and all of those pomo dudes who had that idea of, instead of hiding the structure and making it look organic and natural, we're going to put the structure on the outside. But most of the time, at least for me, all I could attend to [in Swing Time] was that act of structural self-consciousness.

The fiction is not autobiographical. Maybe to some extent it is, of course.

The story is not in the plot but in the telling.

Writing in the first person automatically gives you a point of view.

It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.

I always knew from the beginning that this was the only way to write Then We Came To The End - that it had to be in first - person plural if it was going to illustrate how the individual becomes part of the collective. I had no interest in writing the book in a more conventional voice. It goes back to that fascination I had with telling a story in multiple ways. It was the only choice I gave myself, really - I said "This is it, pal. If you can't tell a story this way, you're going to have to abandon the book. Write it this way or give up."

I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn.

I thought of the structure as musical. The first piece, for instance, contains the names/subject matter of every person to come in the book. Like a piece of music with themes, etc.

I'm not sure that all books aren't that way. I think that might apply to any book I was writing. The book was kind of the product of this enormous infatuation I had, not only with the office and office politics, but with perspective, and trying to tell a story from as wide a range of perspectives as you possibly can. I tried to capture it all with the first-person plural, but once I settled on that, I used it to tell the story from as many angles as I could. I guess, to put it romantically, it was about a love affair with the craft of perspective.

Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.

The characters are telling you the story. I'm not telling you the story, they're going to do it. If I do it right, you will get the whole story.

I always think about the books I'm doing in pretty much the same way. I'm simply trying to write that particular novel as well as that particular novel can be written. I want to listen to what it is telling me, trying to figure out what it wants to do as much as what I want to do with it. There's a negotiation that's constant and ongoing between me and the material I'm working with, because I'm trying to listen to it.

Don't tell readers what to think. Let the action speak for itself.

Call on literary convention, and it will gladly tell your story for you.

It's my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing.

If you have a single narrator, a person like an "I" - "'I' did this" and "'I' did that" - it automatically solves the most difficult problem in writing.

I believe that all novels, ... deal with character, and that it is to express character – not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved ... The great novelists have brought us to see whatever they wish us to see through some character. Otherwise they would not be novelists, but poet, historians, or pamphleteers.

And it's kind of my own fault too, in the sense that I've used my own life as a literary device so much. I think people feel very comfortable reviewing the idea of me, as opposed to what I've actually written. I find that most of the time, when people write about one of my books, they're really just writing about what they think I may or may not represent, as sort of this abstract entity. Is that unfair? Not really. If I put myself in this position where I'm going to kind of weave elements of memoir into almost everything, well, I suppose that's going to happen.

I have no policy, for or against: only a personal style. Which is to say, I use them when I think it's appropriate to; for example, an internal monologue by a locquacious and verbose narrator is more likely to be larded with adverbs than an exchange of instant messages between cops at a crime scene.