As an author, you spend a lot of time by yourself in a room making clicky noises. It gets pretty insulated. You realize pretty early on in your career that even if this goes well, you could spend all your life in a room alone. Unless you pick projects that are going to get you out doing things, you're not going to actually live your life.

Christopher Moore

I've sort of made a reputation by high-stepping my way out of genre. As soon as somebody says, 'He does this,' I'm not standing there anymore.

Christopher Moore

You can't teach someone to be funny, but you can teach comic timing. If you listen to a good comic, you can learn how to put it on a page.

Christopher Moore

When I teach seminars, I tell people, 'Your stuff has to look like something that's out there, because otherwise nobody will take a chance on you.'

Christopher Moore

As Richard Pryor was to Eddie Murphy, that's what Kurt Vonnegut was to me.

Christopher Moore

I just finished a novel called 'Exult,' by Joe Quirk, last night. It's about hang gliding. I liked his first book, too, 'The Ultimate Rush.' I now know that I never, ever, ever want to go hang gliding, so that's good.

Christopher Moore

I think beta males on an evolutionary basis are much more successful than the alpha males are. You don't hear much about us, but there's a lot more of us out there.

Christopher Moore

The fact that 'A Dirty Job' has comedy and supernatural horror in it, that both are woven in and out of it with a whimsical tone, despite the fact that it's about death, makes it hard to characterize with standard genre labels - but I have no problem with that. I'd call it a funny story about death, and leave it at that.

Christopher Moore

San Francisco is a breathtakingly beautiful city, with lots of great contrasts between dark and light, often overlapping each other. It's a great setting for a horror story.

Christopher Moore

I don't give a toss about being remembered after my death.

Christopher Moore

I kind of dislike 'For Whom the Bell Tolls,' but most of Hemingway in general, mainly because his stylistic shenanigans ruined so many young writers of my generation who tried to imitate him. I think, for his time, he moved fiction to a different level stylistically, or at least added to the dialogue, but in our time, he's annoying.

Christopher Moore

When you're telling stories, you are actually trying to illuminate some portion of the truth in an artful way. The story may immediately seem to be a lie, but it's like an impressionistic painting - you see the light and the color better than you would with a photo-realistic piece.

Christopher Moore

For me, 'Lamb' started out as a further exploration of the phenomenon of faith and the responsibility of a messiah that I touched on in 'Coyote Blue' and 'Island of the Sequined Love Nun,' but it ended up being an exploration of the true meaning of sacrifice, loyalty, and friendship.

Christopher Moore

I thought I was going to be a horror story writer. My influences were horror writers, like Rich Matheson, Ray Bradbury and Bram Stoker.

Christopher Moore

I really don't think of my work in terms of a genre. I think of it in terms of what I want to say, what I think is cool, and what I'm good at.

Christopher Moore

One thing that's really delightful is my books tend to attract people who are funny, so I get the benefit of people writing me with things that crack me up.

Christopher Moore

As much as I encourage communication with my readers, I don't want reviews from them, simply because I don't need to be hamstrung in the middle of working on something.

Christopher Moore

I don't read reviews if I know in advance they're negative, because I can't have my confidence undermined when I'm writing.

Christopher Moore

When you go on book tour, you're always talking about yourself and your book from the time you get up in the morning until you go out at night. You, you. You get really sick of yourself.

Christopher Moore

I'm not afraid of getting into a subject I don't know much about.

Christopher Moore

The reason I wrote 'You Suck' was that I so enjoyed spending time with Tommy and Jody.

Christopher Moore