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.

Ottessa Moshfegh

What's inspiring me the most [is] injustice. My own growth as a member of the human race, in terms of the veils being lifted, seeing more of the beauty and also the horror. A sense of my own purpose in this life. Love...

Ottessa Moshfegh

love-life growth race

I was the first person in my family born in the United States. My mom is from Croatia, and my dad is from Iran. They met at music school in Belgium. I grew up as a pianist.

Ottessa Moshfegh

dad mom school

I love art because I feel that it's evidence of the great shared universal power. I like art that feels real, that cuts the bullshit.

Ottessa Moshfegh

cutting real art

Indifference is the saddest state of being. It's like PTSD - you're not gonna fight, you're not gonna run, you're just frozen there, feeling nothing. It's very easy to have conversations when you're sitting there feeling nothing, to talk about the weather or what you had for lunch, to Instagram what you had for lunch. We're all suffering from trauma. This world is so crazy. How do we feel safe here? I think that's the question everybody's asking, "What do I need to do to feel safe? Like I'm okay?" I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

Ottessa Moshfegh

crazy fighting running

I've always really enjoyed sharing my work with others. I find it really hard if I don't think the work will exist outside of my own apartment.

Ottessa Moshfegh

apartment my-own thinking

If you look at the horror genre, that work is all about making people uncomfortable by stimulating our fear of death.

Ottessa Moshfegh

horror-genre people looks

Think about every time you've seen someone being objectified, abused, enslaved. We see it constantly on the TV, in magazines, on the Internet. We've become numb, so we do nothing. The accumulation of passivity might make reading about that exploitation uncomfortable. And sometimes when I'm writing, I think of it like this: "People seem to like garbage, so here is what garbage smells like..."

Ottessa Moshfegh

reading writing thinking

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.

Ottessa Moshfegh

writing art thinking

I was really interested in piano and sort of discovered that I was a writer when I was about 13 and started writing. And it was my secret thing and my passion.

Ottessa Moshfegh

piano passion writing

I don't like talking too much about my personal life, but it all goes into my work.

Ottessa Moshfegh

talking-too-much too-much talking

Sometimes I think I'm a nihilist because it doesn't matter, none of this matters. We're all following the will of some unknowable higher power, probably the stars manipulating our cellular magnets. We think we have all this agency, but do we? Do we really? Can you choose to be brave when you were born a coward? Can we be deprogrammed from the brainwashing that we grew up in? I think we can, but I think we need a lot of help.

Ottessa Moshfegh

coward brave thinking

I was feeling like I'd been born in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people. I don't believe that anymore, not coincidentally two years after writing Eileen. I think that was the driving curiosity for me, thinking about real and fictional characters who could respond to that problem.

Ottessa Moshfegh

real writing believe

I'm asking the reader to suspend reality with me and entertain the idea that the person writing is not me. In order to do that well, I think, one needs to point out the artifice of the narrative. Somehow if the narrator is self-aware then it's almost more humanizing and more relatable.

Ottessa Moshfegh

writing reality thinking

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.

Ottessa Moshfegh

writing character thinking

You know that's why people don't like unlikeable characters. It's not that they're not interesting. Everybody knows the most interesting character in a book or a movie or whatever narrative is the villain.

Ottessa Moshfegh

character book interesting

I hope that I'm the kind of person who would step in between somebody holding a gun at somebody else. I would like to be that stupid. I'd like to be that in love with life.

Ottessa Moshfegh

love-life gun stupid

Distance is where people get really confused. If you stand really far away from someone you're like, "That's not me. I'm so far away from that person. That person is so different from me." It's easy to forget that people - refugees from Syria, for example - are exactly like us.

Ottessa Moshfegh

confused distance people

There are all these levels of pretension in LA. Every time you walk into a café or a bar or a restaurant in LA everybody turns around to see if you're famous. Everybody can seem like a celebrity. You can meet somebody who looks like Joe Schmoe and he turns out to be the head of HBO or something. Or you meet a person who just won an Oscar and he looks like he just won an Oscar. And it's a sprawling city, there's so many different parts to it.

Ottessa Moshfegh

pretension different

I don't think there's anything wrong with pity. Like if you saw a dog having just been hit by a car, you would pity that dog. But then what do you do? Do you leave it there to get run over by more cars, or do you step into traffic and hold up your hand? "Stop! An animal has been hit!" and carry the thing to safety?

Ottessa Moshfegh

dog running animal

The way that I see third person is it's actually first person. Writing for me is all voice work. Third person narrative is just as character-driven as first person narrative for me in terms of a voice. I don't write very much in third person.

Ottessa Moshfegh

term writing