Wit & Attitude Quote by Rick Moody

Moody’s jab lands because it refuses the polite reverence that often surrounds “difficult” literary style. He’s not attacking ambition; he’s attacking the moment ambition turns into self-enclosure, when prose becomes a performance for its own sake and the reader is left outside the room, hearing only the muffled thump of cleverness. The profanity does real work here: it’s a pressure-release valve against the high-cultural reflex to pretend confusion is automatically profound.

Name-checking Gertrude Stein sharpens the point. Stein is an easy target and a revealing one: a modernist icon whose radical repetition and syntactic loops were designed to remake perception, not to tell a story in the usual way. By saying she’s “sometimes” an example, Moody signals a novelist’s uneasy respect. He knows Stein’s breakthroughs matter; he’s also insisting that difficulty needs an engine. If the reader can’t track intention - emotional, narrative, intellectual - then style stops reading as risk and starts reading as evasiveness.

The subtext is a defense of legibility as an ethical stance, not a pandering one. “Boring” is the quiet threat in workshop culture and literary scenes: the worst accusation isn’t that a book is wrong, but that it can’t sustain attention. Moody is drawing a line between productive estrangement (where confusion eventually pays off) and mere opacity (where confusion is the point). The intent is corrective, almost craft-based: experiment all you want, but give the reader a reason to stay.