Daily Inspiration Quote by Rick Moody

Genre is the filing cabinet readers reach for when theyre scared of wasting time. Rick Moody’s line tilts the cabinet onto the floor. “Only of interest later” is a quiet rebuke to the marketplace reflex that demands a label before a book has even begun to work on you. He’s implying that genre is not the experience; it’s the postmortem.

The intent feels practical as much as aesthetic. For a novelist who’s moved through realism, satire, and formally restless work, genre can be a trap: it invites critics to judge the book against a rulebook instead of on its own weather. Moody’s phrasing is deceptively mild. He doesn’t declare genre meaningless; he demotes it. The subtext is: read first, categorize afterward. Let the sentence-level pressure, the voice, the weirdness or clarity, declare its own stakes before you start asking whether it “counts” as literary fiction, autofiction, or whatever shelf the algorithm wants.

Context matters: late-20th and early-21st-century publishing has turned genre into both a marketing tool and a moral verdict. “Literary” gets prestige; “genre” gets speed and predictability; hybrids get suspicion. Moody’s line pushes against that hierarchy while also acknowledging how classification inevitably returns. Of course we sort, compare, and historicize. We just shouldn’t let the sorting replace attention. The best books, he suggests, are legible in the gut before theyre legible in the catalog.