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Quote by Ottessa Moshfegh

“You can't be a free spirit in a place that feels like it was built on lockdown.”

Author

Ottessa Moshfegh is a contemporary American author known for her unique narrative style and profound psychological insights. Her works often explore themes of loneliness, alienation, and moral dilemmas in modern society. more

“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."”

People Insane Fishy

Author:Ottessa Moshfegh

“People have been asking me, "What advice do you have for young writers?" I tell them: a) get off social media; b) don't ask your friends what they think about your work or your ideas. You need to focus and be insane within yourself to build your sandcastle. The mind is so malleable and you need to have a steel trap around it, at least while you're working on something.”

People Thinking Mind Focus Advice Social Media Insane

Author:Ottessa Moshfegh

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

Writing Spiritual Exercise Spiritual Experience

Author:Ottessa Moshfegh

“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.”

Giving Universe Teach Like You Stuck

Author:Ottessa Moshfegh

“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.”

People Thinking World Writing Book School Interesting Risk College Smart League Thoughtful Being Real Life Experience Arrogant Really Interesting Smart People

Author:Ottessa Moshfegh

“Postman is a media analyst and his theory is that television doesn't influence our culture, but that it is our culture and the presidency and anything that relies on television.”

Culture Influence Media Television Theory Rely Presidency Analysts Postman

Author:Val Kilmer

“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.”

Thinking Writing Art Important Understanding Divine Dedicated

Author:Ottessa Moshfegh

“In fiction the narrator is a performance of voice, and it can be any style of voice, but I'm interested in the ways that a voice that knows it's telling a story is actually telling a different story than it intends to. In the way that I can sit here and tell you what I had for breakfast, but I'm really telling you that I'm having an affair, something like that. And I don't think my writing is plain, but I think a lot of my characters are just talking. There is vulnerability there, in that we can start to see through them, we can start to see where they're deceiving themselves.”

Thinking Writing Different Character Style Affair Vulnerability Deceiving

Author:Ottessa Moshfegh

“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.”

Giving Character Honest Pity Makeup Harsh Want U

Author:Ottessa Moshfegh

“A lot of humanists treat religion as if it were simply a kind of rival cosmological hypothesis, and that this is all it is. My view is that to the extent that religions are cosmological hypotheses, this is not the only important thing about them, and we - atheists- will never get a proper understanding of what religion is if we focus too much on the cosmology.”

Kind Important Understanding Focus Cosmology

Author:Tim Crane

Quote by Ottessa Moshfegh

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