I like most things about being a writer. I like the fact of writing. I like how much better I get in subsequent drafts. I like the restless journey of creativity, the discovery part of it. I like that there are books by me in the world, and that there are people who read them. But I guess I don’t like the solitude that is required sometimes. I think sometimes I will do just about anything to avoid the solitary part. I will talk to people I would never talk to otherwise, sometimes, just to avoid work. In fact, I’m answering this question right now in order to avoid work.
I also really dislike the dinners after readings on campuses. I could go on at some length, provisionally, about why I imagine these dinners are so often awful, and why, that one time, I said the words ‘I don’t give a shit what Virginia Woolf thought’ at one of these dinners, even though I love Virginia Woolf. But the why or the wherefore of it is less important than the sheer fact of the matter: if you go to give a reading on a campus, you will have a really head-bangingly awful dinner with the department afterward. Expect to regret your writing life entirely.
–Rick Moody has received numerous literary honors, including the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir, The Paris Review Aga Khan Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has written ten books, including The Ice Storm, The Diviners, and The Four Fingers of Death. He is also a singer, composer and essayist.
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