Top Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Ottessa Moshfegh Biography

Ottessa Moshfegh

Ottessa Moshfegh is an American author and novelist. Moshfegh was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Her mother was born in Croatia and her father was born in Iran. She lived in China in her early 20s.

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Ottessa Moshfegh Quotes

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.

Gun, Life, Love, Love Life, Somebody, Stupid

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.

Country, Interested, Moving, Solar, World

What's inspiring me the most [is] injustice. My own growth as a member of the human race, in terms of the veils being lifted, seeing more of the beauty and also the horror. A sense of my own purpose in this life. Love. . .

Beauty, Growth, Love Life, Race, Seeing, Sense

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.

Afraid, Blessed, Experience, Love, Love You, People

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.

Continue, Fine, People, Police, Reflected, Thinking

If you look at the horror genre, that work is all about making people uncomfortable by stimulating our fear of death.

Death, Horror Genre, Looks, People, Uncomfortable

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.

Character, Characters, Giving, Makeup, Present, Under

I don't need to feel 100% safe, but I have to feel like there's room for me to go a little bit insane if I'm going to have good ideas. Because a good idea is a new idea and if you start going around like, "I have this new idea!" most people are gonna be like, "I've never heard that before, that sounds fishy. "

Fishy, Good, Insane, People, Room

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.

Brave, Cellular, Coward, Help, Stars, Thinking

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.

Attitude, Hanging, People, Positive, Shitty, Special

Reality is a projection of consciousness, so if you believe - more than just think - but believe, subliminally, that something is true, it will become true because you will make micro-decisions based on the reality that you have faith in.

Believe, Consciousness, Make, Reality, Thinking

There are all these levels of pretension in LA. Every time you walk into a café or a bar or a restaurant in LA everybody turns around to see if you're famous. Everybody can seem like a celebrity. You can meet somebody who looks like Joe Schmoe and he turns out to be the head of HBO or something. Or you meet a person who just won an Oscar and he looks like he just won an Oscar. And it's a sprawling city, there's so many different parts to it.

Different, Joe, Levels, Oscar, Parts, Pretension

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.

Artifice, Idea, Reader, Reality, Thinking, Writing

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.

Door, Exists, Giving, Like You, Stuck, Teach

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.

Book, College, Smart, Things, Writing

I was the first person in my family born in the United States. My mom is from Croatia, and my dad is from Iran. They met at music school in Belgium. I grew up as a pianist.

Born, Dad, Iran, Mom, Music, School

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

Barely, Exercise, Spiritual, Writing

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

Accept, Accepting, Brainwash, Good, Happened, Like

I don't like talking too much about my personal life, but it all goes into my work.

Life, Like, Talking, Talking Too Much, Too Much, Work

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.

Art, Execute, Life, Thinking, Writer, Writing

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