Latest Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• I had to brainwash myself, like what I was doing was going to be really, really good, and then just accept whatever happened.

  Ottessa Moshfegh

  Accepting

  Source: therumpus.net

• My short stories are so character-based and they're also so private. They're like a private world in each story and I'm getting more and more interested in allowing myself to investigate the big picture about this country, and about human beings, and about the planet, and about the solar system, and about the nature of the material world in general. And I felt like I needed to move into a bigger form.

  Ottessa Moshfegh

  Country, Moving, World

  Source: therumpus.net

• I don't remember reading much at all during the writing of Eileen. I go through several years-long dry spells and I don't feel like reading at all. I was working part-time for a guy in Venice, California while I drafted Eileen. He wanted help in writing his memoir. The research had a lot to do with the 60s, so that must have informed my sense of the place and time in my novel, and perhaps even the memoir point-of-view. He was also from New England. It was a fun job. I learned a lot about motorcycle clubs, Charles Manson, hopping freight trains.

  Ottessa Moshfegh

  Fun, Reading, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

• I prefer reading novels. Short stories are too much like daggers. And now that I'm done with my collection I'm more interested in different forms of writing and other kinds of narrative art. I'm working on a screenplay. But when I was working on Eileen, I definitely felt like I was taking a piss. Like, here I am, typing on my computer, writing the "novel." It wasn't that it was insincere, but there was a kind of farcical feeling I had when I was writing.

  Ottessa Moshfegh

  Art, Reading, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

• I'm asking the reader to suspend reality with me and entertain the idea that the person writing is not me. In order to do that well, I think, one needs to point out the artifice of the narrative. Somehow if the narrator is self-aware then it's almost more humanizing and more relatable.

  Ottessa Moshfegh

  Writing, Reality, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

• I want to say that what is cool about writing self-aware first person narrative is that the awareness is not necessarily the same awareness of the reader. I have a story coming out in the Paris Review and it's about a hipster. He think's he's self-aware, he's very introspective and analytical, but when you're reading it you can totally see through his self-analysis because you have a higher awareness than he does. I like playing with that too.

  Ottessa Moshfegh

  Hipster, Reading, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

• The way that I see third person is it's actually first person. Writing for me is all voice work. Third person narrative is just as character-driven as first person narrative for me in terms of a voice. I don't write very much in third person.

  Ottessa Moshfegh

  Writing, Term

  Source: therumpus.net

• For me, I enjoy intimidating people and I enjoy being intimidated. It is exciting. It's cool to have an experience with someone where you challenge them, and they are afraid, and then they love you and they've grown. When that happens to me, I feel so blessed if somebody has opened my world up a little bit more.

  Ottessa Moshfegh

  Blessed, Love You, People

  Source: therumpus.net

• You know that's why people don't like unlikeable characters. It's not that they're not interesting. Everybody knows the most interesting character in a book or a movie or whatever narrative is the villain.

  Ottessa Moshfegh

  Book, Character, Interesting

  Source: therumpus.net

• Building a relationship with the character. It's just like sitting with someone you know. It's very easy to predict when they're going to shake their head or say whatever, but because I'm the author I have to make characters do what I want them to do.

  Ottessa Moshfegh

  Character, Building, Easy

  Source: therumpus.net

• Anybody that I like that you talk to about me will probably agree that when I'm hanging out with someone one-on-one, I have a tendency to build this attitude toward the world outside of us, it's us and them. I'm with you here, and you're with me, and we are in the club and everybody else out there is in that shitty club. The positive is I make people feel really special, and I also make some people really uncomfortable and judged, and I'm working on that.

  Ottessa Moshfegh

  Attitude, People, Special

  Source: therumpus.net

• I was feeling like I'd been born in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people. I don't believe that anymore, not coincidentally two years after writing Eileen. I think that was the driving curiosity for me, thinking about real and fictional characters who could respond to that problem.

  Ottessa Moshfegh

  Real, Believe, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

• I hope that I'm the kind of person who would step in between somebody holding a gun at somebody else. I would like to be that stupid. I'd like to be that in love with life.

  Ottessa Moshfegh

  Stupid, Love Life, Gun

  Source: logger.believermag.com

• Sometimes I think I'm a nihilist because it doesn't matter, none of this matters. We're all following the will of some unknowable higher power, probably the stars manipulating our cellular magnets. We think we have all this agency, but do we? Do we really? Can you choose to be brave when you were born a coward? Can we be deprogrammed from the brainwashing that we grew up in? I think we can, but I think we need a lot of help.

  Ottessa Moshfegh

  Thinking, Brave, Coward

  Source: logger.believermag.com

• Distance is where people get really confused. If you stand really far away from someone you're like, "That's not me. I'm so far away from that person. That person is so different from me." It's easy to forget that people - refugees from Syria, for example - are exactly like us.

  Ottessa Moshfegh

  Confused, Distance, People

  Source: logger.believermag.com

• Indifference is the saddest state of being. It's like PTSD - you're not gonna fight, you're not gonna run, you're just frozen there, feeling nothing. It's very easy to have conversations when you're sitting there feeling nothing, to talk about the weather or what you had for lunch, to Instagram what you had for lunch. We're all suffering from trauma. This world is so crazy. How do we feel safe here? I think that's the question everybody's asking, "What do I need to do to feel safe? Like I'm okay?" I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

  Ottessa Moshfegh

  Running, Crazy, Fighting

  Source: logger.believermag.com

• I don't think there's anything wrong with pity. Like if you saw a dog having just been hit by a car, you would pity that dog. But then what do you do? Do you leave it there to get run over by more cars, or do you step into traffic and hold up your hand? "Stop! An animal has been hit!" and carry the thing to safety?

  Ottessa Moshfegh

  Running, Dog, Animal

  Source: logger.believermag.com

• I think we waste a lot of time trying to convince other people that we're right. A lot of times we don't actually care what another person thinks, we just want to say what we think. To hear it reflected back to us and that we're okay, to hear that we have been understood and that we're correct - so that we can continue to be who we are in the ways we've been being, and we have nothing to feel bad about and everything is just fine. Even if what we're talking about is, like, police brutality.

  Ottessa Moshfegh

  Thinking, People, Police

  Source: logger.believermag.com

• I don't really pity any of my characters. I hold my characters under a harsh fluorescent lamp and ask "Who are you?" I'm not doing their makeup or giving them hairdos. They present themselves to me as they are and then I let them say what they want. Usually they're saying something too honest.

  Ottessa Moshfegh

  Character, Makeup, Giving

  Source: logger.believermag.com

• In fiction the narrator is a performance of voice, and it can be any style of voice, but I'm interested in the ways that a voice that knows it's telling a story is actually telling a different story than it intends to. In the way that I can sit here and tell you what I had for breakfast, but I'm really telling you that I'm having an affair, something like that. And I don't think my writing is plain, but I think a lot of my characters are just talking. There is vulnerability there, in that we can start to see through them, we can start to see where they're deceiving themselves.

  Ottessa Moshfegh

  Writing, Character, Thinking

  Source: logger.believermag.com

• I've dedicated a lot of my life as a writer to understanding how to hear the divine voice, or the music of the spheres, or whatever it is that we do when we're making art, making something out of nothing. Figuring out how to do that is much more important than knowing how to execute a good line. I don't think about that anymore, I just write.

  Ottessa Moshfegh

  Art, Writing, Thinking

  Source: logger.believermag.com

• There are a lot of smart people being really thoughtful and writing really interesting things, but that isn't what I want to do. It's never felt like what I've been called to do. And I have to risk sounding really arrogant when I say that because I've gone to Ivy League schools and been privileged in all these ways in the world of ideas, but I'm not as smart as you think. I'm not really depending on what I learned in college to write my books. Those were just parts of my life experience.

  Ottessa Moshfegh

  Smart, Book, Writing

  Source: logger.believermag.com

• What you can't teach someone is how to find the door. You can't give someone a door to another universe. You can tell them that the door exists, and if they're stuck in the hallway you can be like, "You're stuck in the hallway," but you can't open the door for them.

  Ottessa Moshfegh

  Giving, Like You, Stuck

  Source: logger.believermag.com

• For me writing isn't a mental exercise, it's barely even a literary exercise, it feels like a spiritual experience.

  Ottessa Moshfegh

  Spiritual, Writing, Exercise

  Source: logger.believermag.com

• People have been asking me, "What advice do you have for young writers?" I tell them: a) get off social media; b) don't ask your friends what they think about your work or your ideas. You need to focus and be insane within yourself to build your sandcastle. The mind is so malleable and you need to have a steel trap around it, at least while you're working on something.

  Ottessa Moshfegh

  Thinking, People, Focus

  "'We're all together on this weird planet doing weird shit': an Interview with Writer Ottessa Moshfegh". Interview with Kameron Bashi, believermag.com. May 15, 2017.