Life & Mortality Quote by Rick Moody

Moody’s line is funny in that distinctly writerly way: a confession that sounds high-minded for half a second, then undercuts itself with bureaucracy. “Read more dead people” gestures toward canon, permanence, the grown-up diet of literature. But the real engine is the clause that follows: “because I keep having to read stuff for juries and so forth.” The motive isn’t reverence; it’s self-defense.

The subtext is a complaint about contemporary literary life as paperwork. Juries (prizes, grants, contests, fellowships) turn reading into adjudication, and adjudication turns the page into a spreadsheet. You’re not surrendering to a novel; you’re scanning for craft, novelty, and marketable seriousness, all under deadline pressure. “So forth” does extra work here: it’s the weary wave at an expanding universe of professional obligations that parasitize the very thing that made you a novelist in the first place.

Dead writers become a refuge because they can’t email you, network with you, or be harmed by your judgment. They also don’t arrive wrapped in the social anxieties of the present: reputations to manage, identities to misread, careers to accidentally influence. Moody’s intent feels less like anti-modern snobbery than a desire to recover reading as something private, slow, and non-instrumental.

There’s an irony, too: a living writer seeking relief in the dead, not out of nostalgia but to escape the relentless churn of literary “content” and civic-cultural labor. The joke lands because it’s true: even the act of reading can become a job, and the only reliable vacation is a book whose author is beyond the economy.