Top 100 Walter Mosley Quotes
#1. I think that the power over death and life is the greatest strength that any person can have. It trumps sex and wealth. If I'm willing to die no one can master me.
Walter Mosley
#2. We are not trapped or locked up in these bones. No, no. We are free to change. And love changes us. And if we can love one another, we can break open the sky.
Walter Mosley
#3. He looked like a butler dressed by his four-year-old daughter - a mishmash of good intentions and ill design. And there I was, an unshaven, rumpled page of discarded poetry, extending a hand and smiling, no doubt wolfishly.
Walter Mosley
#4. If it wasn't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all.
Walter Mosley
#5. A lot of people ... kind of make heroes that are separate from us, people who are, you know, like ... John Wayne and Errol Flynn and, you know, Denzel Washington ... people who are different, who are larger than life.
Walter Mosley
#6. It's the strongest love that makes the greatest treachery. The worst thing you can say to somebody is that you will be there no matter what and then fail to show.
Walter Mosley
#7. This is all you have to do. Sit down once a day to the novel and start working without internal criticism, without debilitating expectations, without the need to look at your words as if they were already printed and bound. The beginning is only a draft. Drafts are imperfect by definition.
Walter Mosley
#8. But all of those things were possible back then even though nobody
Walter Mosley
#9. The girl was cinnamon colored in the way of Native America after it had been raped by Europe.
Walter Mosley
#10. It's like a door open at the side of the house and this cool breeze is blowing in over the back of my neck. The breeze is Death whispering and that door is open for me to go through anytime I want. And I want to go through. I want the confusion to stop
no, not only confusion but pain too.
Walter Mosley
#11. Susan Straight finds LA's secret heart in Between Heaven and Here and with a sleight of hand only the masters have, she creates an alley, a neighborhood, a history that is as rich and tragic as any Shakespearean tale.
Walter Mosley
#12. But I wasn't there to treat the incurable ills of megalomania.
Walter Mosley
#13. When I went to school, there were no Black philosophers, at least none that I was aware of, who were recognized by Western universities.
Walter Mosley
#14. It's a disheartening feeling when you can't stand the touch of someone but neither can you push them away.
Walter Mosley
#15. Angel, you got checkout girls in these here grocery stores cain't feed their own kids right, jazz musicians workin' for the post office because music don't pay the charge of admission to a nightclub. You might love your work but one day you wake up and find that your work don't love you.
Walter Mosley
#16. It was a regular family scene. All we had to do was clean up a few murders and a matter of international dope smuggling, then we could move next door to Donna Reed.
Walter Mosley
#17. I have never thought that I have sacrificed anything being a writer. That might not be true, maybe I have sacrificed something. Maybe I've given something up, but I can't think of it.
Walter Mosley
#18. A man's bookcase will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about him.
Walter Mosley
#19. I hit him more times than necessary but by then my actions were mostly chemical, like a soldier ant or a teenager in love.
Walter Mosley
#20. The way I write is this: I write about a thousand words a day, a little bit more. The next morning, I read those thousand words and cursorily edit that. Then I write the next thousand. I do that all the way to the end of the book and then I reread the book quite a few times, editing as go through.
Walter Mosley
#21. I laugh, that there's a certain kind of cyclical nature to life and that I don't have to worry because whatever isn't there right now, it's coming back again.
Walter Mosley
#22. He made me question what was, when for a whole lifetime up till that moment, I accepted the world's excuses.
Walter Mosley
#23. Our collective freedom ... depends on our ability to defend the rights of others.
Walter Mosley
#24. My father cared about the world he lived in, and so he admitted his confusion about his place in America because he didn't want me to make the same mistake in my life.
Walter Mosley
#25. Writing is almost a place of dreams for me, and I don't have to give up anything to do it.
Walter Mosley
#26. We must remember that there's more than one story and plot in every novel. There are at least as many stories as there are main characters, and each of these stories has to have multiple plots to keep it going - blood and bone, nerve and tissue, forgotten longing and unknown events.
Walter Mosley
#27. I never really thought I'd be successful. I never though I'd get books published, but this was something completely beyond me. The fact that it happened is wonderful, but it is not something that I was aiming for.
Walter Mosley
#28. Better to listen to the gospel than to a mortal leader.
Walter Mosley
#29. Mrs. Turner gripped my baby finger.
It's amazing how a man can feel sex anywhere on his body.
Walter Mosley
#30. Literature is the adventure. It's the story, it's the fight, it's people falling in love, it's people with deep personality disorders who succeed anyway beyond themselves. That's what great literature is.
Walter Mosley
#31. Maybe that's what they're afraid of. Maybe they don't want these children to make up their own minds. Maybe if they did that, the world would change.
Walter Mosley
#32. Love makes you blind to your own survival. And if it doesn't then it's not love at all.
Walter Mosley
#34. Mouse was the truest friend I ever had. And if there is such a thing as true evil, he was that too.
Walter Mosley
#35. The idea of being productive, the idea of producing many books is going to lead you toward you becoming a better and better writer.
Walter Mosley
#36. The job of the writer is to take a close and uncomfortable look at the world they inhabit, the world we all inhabit, and the job of the novel is to make the corpse stink.
Walter Mosley
#37. I believe that a writer has to tell what they think is the truth in a human experience. The truth of the human experience cannot escape the political.
Walter Mosley
#38. I think of writers as explorers, not necessarily as detectives. So there is certainly detecting that is going on, but they're explorers.
Walter Mosley
#39. I couldn't see why it shouldn't be my one hundred dollars.
Walter Mosley
#40. I think that computer programming shows in my writing. Often when I write about computer programmers I'll write about the way that they see the world and they structure the world.
Walter Mosley
#41. The government isn't real," he replied. He might have been talking about Santa Claus or God. "I don't owe anything to anyone who in themselves are lies and liars.
Walter Mosley
#42. Comic books were telling me what life was about. This was how I kind of entered life, through fiction.
Walter Mosley
#43. That's how powerful you are, girl ... You pretty, but pretty alone is not what people see. You the kinda pretty, the kinda beauty, that's like a mirror. Men and women see themselves in you, only now they so beautiful that they can't bear to see you go.
Walter Mosley
#44. I'm writing, I'm using language, I'm using that language to tell stories and even more so to get ideas across. And I just love that, and I've always loved that.
Walter Mosley
#45. At one time if you were a black writer you had to be one of the best writers in the world to be published. You had to be great. Now you can be good. Mediocre. And that's good.
Walter Mosley
#46. HBO and I have a deal to at least try to make a television series from the Leonid McGill stories. We're going to start with the first novel, 'The Long Fall.'
Walter Mosley
#47. Losing my parents really set me adrift in more ways than one. It's not just losing them. It's losing the possibility of family.
Walter Mosley
#49. The fact that we once knew each other in Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas, and that we were both still alive and ambulatory, was a miracle in itself. Where we came from he's dead was as common a phrase as he's sick or he's saved. People died in our world with appalling regularity.
Walter Mosley
#50. I smiled and unraveled a plan that some strategic command at the back of my mind had been hatching while the woman in me made love to Rosetta Jeanette Lawson in the guise of a man.
Walter Mosley
#51. That was why so many Jews back then understood the American Negro; in Europe the Jew had been a Negro for more than a thousand years.
Walter Mosley
#52. Any seed or insect or lizard or mammal that found itself in LA had to believe that there was a chance to thrive. Living in Southern California was like waking up in a children's book titled Would Be If I Could Be.
Walter Mosley
#53. The police and I have a deal. I don't talk to them and they don't listen to me.
Walter Mosley
#54. Purely the idea of writing a lot of books doesn't make you a great writer, but it might be that the process of doing a lot of writing will make you a much better writer.
Walter Mosley
#55. My father's life was so decimated by his earliest experiences. His mother died when he was 7 years old, which he always said was the worst experience in his life. When he was 8, his father disappeared and he was on his own from the age of 8.
Walter Mosley
#56. I find books in used-book stores, chain and independent stores, on friends' shelves and being read by some woman sitting opposite me on the subway. I find books the way a cow finds a new pasture, by looking to see where the other cows are headed.
Walter Mosley
#57. Chirren is the most dangerous creatures on the earth, with the exception of young girls between the ages of fifteen and forty-two.
Walter Mosley
#58. The fear in my heart was like in one of those dreams where you try to run but you can't do it, you can't run because the fear is an anchor in your chest.
Walter Mosley
#59. When you get old you begin to understand that no one talks unless someone listens, and no one knows nuthin' less somebody else can understand.
Walter Mosley
#60. When you deal with a person who's experiencing dementia, you can see where they're struggling with knowledge. You can see what they forget completely, what they forget but they know what they once knew. You can tell how they're trying to remember.
Walter Mosley
#61. A lot of people love their hate. They live to hate the people wronged them. You cain't just have one gang. That don't even make sense. If you took away the white man's black man or the black man's white man, most of 'em wouldn't even know how to walk down the street right.
Walter Mosley
#62. All of the philosophers I studied were white (with a few Eastern exceptions), and, for that matter, they were all male. Africa, the cradle of civilization, seemed to have no footing in the highest form of human thought.
Walter Mosley
#63. Not for the first time in my life I had made it to the top. For some reason this made me hanker for a chili dog with chopped onions under a blanket of processed American cheese.
Walter Mosley
#64. I understood about fear. And I knew better than anyone in that room what Mouse was capable of. But still I had been raised in a place where to show your fear was worse than cowardice. It was suicide, a sin.
Walter Mosley
#65. I think that people don't know how to do anything anymore. My father was a janitor. He could take a car apart and put it back together. He could build a house in the back yard. Today, if you ask people what they know, they say, 'I know how to hire someone.
Walter Mosley
#66. Your people have lost the vision and vitality of your ancestors (73).
Walter Mosley
#67. If you want to write believable fiction, you will have to cross over the line of your self-restraint and revel in the words and ideas that you would never express in your everyday life.
Walter Mosley
#68. I've written a lot of really good books. Now we'll see if I can write any more good books. I mean there's a chance I won't, but I'm going to try.
Walter Mosley
#69. Blood may be thicker than water, but family has them both beat.
Walter Mosley
#70. My experience of people in dementia is that a lot of their personality, a lot of their knowledge, a lot of their experience is still there but there's not a direction connection that they can just reach out and get it and then bring it back.
Walter Mosley
#71. Let me speak to your boss I said. Six magic words that roil deep in the bowels of anymore collecting a paycheck on a biweekly basis. It's like winking at a leprechaun: he has to give up his pot of gold, and yet no one knows why.
Walter Mosley
#72. I gave my children the kind of dreams they could live by, but dreams are like oceans, Mr. McGill. If they're worth a damn they're bigger than the dreamer, and sometimes, when the one dreaming wants to be as big as what they imagine, the wave pulls'em down.
Walter Mosley
#73. I always tell people, if a young girl read "Beloved" as her first novel, she'd have to kill either herself or her mother, because in "Beloved" you have a mother killing their children. This is not something a child would accept very easily. And would never understand.
Walter Mosley
#74. There's a resistance for people to talk about things that make them feel guilty. When natural disasters happen, it's easier not to feel guilty about it.
Walter Mosley
#75. There was something about his grandfather's death, about men who love their sons ...
Walter Mosley
#76. I took up writing to escape the drudgery of that every day cubicle kind of war.
Walter Mosley
#77. Sometimes you might forget who you are and where, but that's okay because there's always somebody around that's happy to remind you.
Walter Mosley
#78. There are as many kinds of love as there are flowers and bugs put together but men and women and their needs are all the same.
Walter Mosley
#79. if I had only picked up a telephone and spoken my heart.
Walter Mosley
#81. That would be like me tellin' a gosling not to migrate down south his first mature season. You got to go. Got to. There's gonna be snakes and foxes, and in your case, [ ... ], there might even be men with guns.
Walter Mosley
#82. Many & most moments go by with us hardly aware of their passage. But love & hate & fear cause time to snag you, to drag you down like a spider's web holding fast to a doomed fly's wings. And when you're caught like that you're aware of every moment & movement & nuance.
Walter Mosley
#83. I'm sorry he's dead but I am happier, by far, that he lived.
Walter Mosley
#84. Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.
Walter Mosley
#85. If you want to be a writer, you have to write every day ... You don't go to a well once but daily. You don't skip a child's breakfast or forget to wake up in the morning ...
Walter Mosley
#86. When I turned 59, I looked at that as the first day of my 60th year, so I've been 60 for the last 365 days, in my opinion. So I've been thinking all this year, I'm 60 - this is the time when I need to get some stuff done.
Walter Mosley
#87. It hurts when they're gone. And it doesn't matter if it's slow or fast, whether it's a long drawn-out disease or an unexpected accident. When they're gone the world turns upside down and you're left holding on, trying not to fall off.
Walter Mosley
#88. I think it's some kind of meeting of energies that causes what we see, and that part of those energies emanate from our lifeforces, our minds.
Walter Mosley
#89. Asking a Southern woman for plain hospitality was like winking at a leprechaun: She had to give up her pot of gold no matter what.
Walter Mosley
#90. The biggest misconception that people have about the literary life is the romance of it. That a writer has this large world available to him or her of people, of ideas, of experiences, of interchange of ideas.
Walter Mosley
#91. The great man say that life is pain," Coydog had said over eighty-five years before. "That mean if you love life, then you love the hurt come along wit' it. Now, if that ain't the blues, I don't know what is.
Walter Mosley
#92. The reader is always looking for two things in the novel: themselves and transcendence.
Walter Mosley
#93. My hero in comic books is Jack Kirby: 'Spider-Man,' 'Fantastic Four,' 'Captain America,' Marvel Comics. He was really the basis for Marvel Comics.
Walter Mosley
#94. All writing is that structure of revelation. There's something you want to find out. If you know everything up front in the beginning, you really don't need to read further if there's nothing else to find out.
Walter Mosley
#95. There's many things that I am. And all of those things come together at some point. If somebody wants to limit me, you know and they'll say, 'Well, this is Walter Mosley, the mystery writer.' I don't like that. Because I do many things.
Walter Mosley
#96. The first thing you have to know about writing is that it is something you must do everyday. There are two reasons for this rule: Getting the work done and connecting with your unconscious mind.
Walter Mosley
#97. I write every day and I just love doing it. It's just a wonderful thing. Some of my stories work, some of them don't work. Some of them are wild and I love them, but they certainly don't fit into any kind of a normal system that I know about.
Walter Mosley
#98. Your book grows. The early part of your book is growing still while you are writing the later part of your book.
Walter Mosley
#99. Sure can. But you know a white man got to go through sumpin' 'fore he could call a black man friend. White man got to see the shit an' smell it too before he could really know a black friend." Jean-Paul
Walter Mosley
#100. I like to read either in motion or in water ... I am happiest reading in the bathtub.
Walter Mosley
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