Art & Creativity Quote by Rick Moody

There’s a quiet comedy in how Rick Moody turns prestige into drudgery. “About a zillion awards” is obvious hyperbole, but it’s not just a throwaway gag: it’s a miniature protest against the literary ecosystem that asks writers to be permanent jurors, tastemakers, and gatekeepers while still producing art. The line works because it sounds offhand, almost conversational, the way creative labor often gets disguised as casual busyness. If you blink, you miss the admission that the author’s reading life has been commandeered.

The second half pivots from exaggeration to a plain, slightly bleak fact: “so I’ve been reading a lot of books that just came out.” That “so” suggests obligation rather than desire. New releases here aren’t a thrill; they’re inventory. Moody is sketching the way award culture compresses time, pushing everyone toward the new-new-new and turning reading into a professionalized sprint. It’s also a sly status marker: only certain people get asked to judge “a zillion” prizes. He’s both inside the machine and rolling his eyes at it.

The subtext is a critique of how literary legitimacy gets manufactured: books circulate through a small, overworked set of arbiters who are constantly processing the current season’s output. The intent feels less like bragging than fatigue with the ritual. In a single sentence, Moody captures a modern writer’s double bind: you’re expected to have opinions on everything, and the cost is that your relationship to books becomes less private pleasure than cultural triage.