Walter Mosley famous quotes

These short stories are vast structures existing mostly in the subconscious of our cultural history. They will live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That's because a good short story crosses the borders of our nations and our prejudices and our beliefs. A good short story asks a question that can't be answered in simple terms. And even if we come up with some understanding, years later, while glancing out of a window, the story still has the potential to return, to alter right there in our mind and change everything.
-- Walter Mosley

#Dream #Simple #Years

A peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.
-- Walter Mosley

#Waiting #Peasants

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

#Writing #Two #Scary

Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.
-- Walter Mosley

#Metaphor #Teach #Condensation

The process of writing a novel is like taking a journey by boat. You have to continually set yourself on course. If you get distracted or allow yourself to drift, you will never make it to the destination. It's not like highly defined train tracks or a highway; this is a path that you are creating discovering. The journey is your narrative. Keep to it and there will be a tale told.
-- Walter Mosley

#Writing #Journey #Creating

A man's bookcase will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about him
-- Walter Mosley

#Book #Men #Needs

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

#Morning #Children #Writing

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

#Jobs #Looks #World

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

#Beautiful #Girl #Powerful

The first thing you have to know about writing is that it is something you must do every day - every morning or every night, whatever time it is that you have. Ideally, the time you decide on is also the time when you do your best work.
-- Walter Mosley

#Morning #Writing #Night

I took up writing to escape the drudgery of that every day cubicle kind of war.
-- Walter Mosley

#War #Writing #Cubicles

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

#Father #Thinking #Car

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

#Sky #And Love #Bones

The life most of us live are lives we are forced to live by immediate needs, influences, and pressures.
-- Walter Mosley

#Pressure #Needs #Influence

Every day that we wake up is a good day. Every breath that we take is filled with hope for a better day. Every word that we speak is a chance to change what is bad into something good.
-- Walter Mosley

#Good Day #Wake Up #Chance

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

#Heart #Hands #Heaven

... 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

#Character #Writing #Blood

... you should wait until the book is finished before making a judgment on its content. By the time you have gone through twenty drafts, the characters may have developed lives of their own, completely separate from the people you based them on in the beginning. And even if someone, at some time, gets upset with your words - so what? Live your life, sing your song. Anyone who loves you will want you to have that.
-- Walter Mosley

#Song #Book #Love You

I like to read either in motion or in water... I am happiest reading in the bathtub.
-- Walter Mosley

#Reading #Water

Readers no longer need novelists to tell us what it's like to cross the world on a ship or fight a war. In the twenty-first century, we get that information in other ways. The thing that's still a mystery to us is the human heart. What we want is to understand people, what they're doing, and why they're doing it.
-- Walter Mosley

#War #Heart #Fighting

Writing is almost a place of dreams for me, and I don't have to give up anything to do it.
-- Walter Mosley

#Dream #Giving Up #Writing

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

#Writing #Expectations #Criticism

Our collective freedom... depends on our ability to defend the rights of others.
-- Walter Mosley

#Freedom #Rights #Ability

It was mid-November 2008. There were pirates taking ships with impunity in African waters, terrorists punching holes in Indian security, China sinking towards depression because Americans were afraid to buy cheap goods for Christmas, and the richest nation in the history of the world was talking about how to keep a budget.
-- Walter Mosley

#Talking #Water #Pirate

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

#People #Resistance #Guilty

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

#Book #Hero #Men

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

#Father #Mistake #America

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

#Together #Limits #Want

Mouse was the truest friend I ever had. And if there is such a thing as true evil, he was that too.
-- Walter Mosley

#Evil #Mice #Truest

Black men of our day were never told, The sky's the limit. ... We could aspire to Joe Louis but never Henry Ford.
-- Walter Mosley

#Men #Sky #Black

A man who is already insane was frightening enough, but when he goes crazy...
-- Walter Mosley

#Crazy #Men #Insane

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

#Flower #Men #Together

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

#Parent #Way #Adrift

Many writers-in-waiting spend a lot of time avoiding the work at hand. The most common way to avoid writing is by procrastination. This is the writer's greatest enemy. There is little to say about it except that once you decide to write every day, you must make yourself sit at the desk or table for the required period whether or not you are putting down words. Make yourself take the time even if the hours seem fruitless. Ideally, after a few days or weeks of being chained to the desk, you will submit to the story that must be told.
-- Walter Mosley

#Procrastination #Writing #Hands

Lawyer even sounds like liar.
-- Walter Mosley

#Liars #Sound #Lawyer

I know how bad a thing it is to be a slave and I know how terrible it was but I don't believe that there's a free person in the whole world that knows how good a cup full of water can taste. Because you have to be a deprived slave, to be kept waiting for your water like we were to really appreciate how good just one swallow can be. When we finally got a drop on our tongues it was like something straight from the hands of the Almighty.
-- Walter Mosley

#Appreciation #Believe #Hands

My father always taught by telling stories about his experiences. His lessons were about morality and art and what insects and birds and human beings had in common. He told me what it meant to be a man and to be a Black man. He taught me about love and responsibility, about beauty, and how to make gumbo.
-- Walter Mosley

#Art #Father #Responsibility

Chirren [children] is the most dangerous creatures on the earth, with the exception of young girls between the ages of fifteen and forty-two.
-- Walter Mosley

#Girl #Children #Two

Freedom is a state of mind, I said wondering where I'd heard it before, not a state of being. We are all slaves to gravity and morality and the vicissitudes of nature. Our genes govern us much more than we'd like to think. Our bodies can not know absolute freedom but our minds can, can at least try.
-- Walter Mosley

#Thinking #Mind #Trying

The older you get the more you live in the past
-- Walter Mosley

#Past

Science fiction [is] the kind of writing that prepares us for the necessary mutations brought about in society from an ever changing technological world and as a result. The mainstream hasn’t excluded SF; the mainstream has excluded itself. No one told Jules Verne he was a science fiction writer, but he invented the 20th century.
-- Walter Mosley

#Writing #Mutation #Fiction

Love, as the poet says, is like the spring. It grows on you and seduces you slowly and gently, but it holds tight like the roots of a tree. You don't know until you're ready to go that you can't move, that you would have to mutilate yourself in order to be free. That's the feeling. It doesn't last, at least it doesn't have to. But it holds on like a steel claw in your chest. Even if the tree dies, the roots cling to you. I've seen men and women give up everything for love that once was.
-- Walter Mosley

#Giving Up #Spring #Moving

That’s how Ptolemy imagined the disposition of his memories, his thoughts: they were still his, still in the range of his thinking, but they were, many and most of them, locked on the other side a closed door that he’s lost the key for. So his memory became like secrets held away from his own mind. But these secrets were noisy things; they babbled and muttered behind the door, and so if he listened closely he might catch a snatch of something he once knew well.
-- Walter Mosley

#Memories #Thinking #Doors

Rest easy and go with the faith you lived with
-- Walter Mosley

#Easy #Rest Easy

I've always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things.” – Associated Press interview, 12-7-11
-- Walter Mosley

#Thinking #Interviews #Fiction

We born dyin'...But you ask a man an' he talk like he gonna live forevah.
-- Walter Mosley

#Men #Born

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

#Time #Hate #Wings

Better to listen to the gospel than to a mortal leader.
-- Walter Mosley

#Leader

A man's bookcase will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about him," my father had told me more than once. "A businessman has business books and a dream has novels and books of poetry. Most women like reading about love, and a true revolutionary will have books about the minutiae of overthrowing the oppressor. A person with no books is inconsequential in a modern setting, but a peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.
-- Walter Mosley

#Dream #Father #Book

I'm just a survivor from the train wreck of the modern world.
-- Walter Mosley

#World #Wrecks #Survivor

The police and I have a deal. I don't talk to them and they don't listen to me.
-- Walter Mosley

#Police #Deals #Listen To Me

I'm almost completely without family and it's a very odd feeling in life. I have no children.
-- Walter Mosley

#Children #Feelings #Odd

I would have been completely brainwashed by this lopsided and racist view of the world if it weren't for my father. He was a deep thinker and an irrepressible problem solver. He was a Black Socrates, asking why and then spoiling ready-made replies.
-- Walter Mosley

#Father #Views #Black

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

#Fall #Hbo #Long

I don't ever know where I'm going. Because one of the wonderful things about writing, which is different than working in programming, you don't need to know. You could just write and discover where you're going. And it's a great deal of fun.
-- Walter Mosley

#Fun #Writing #Needs

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

#Struggle #Trying #Remember

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

#Black #World #Mediocre

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

#Writing #Needs #Want

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

#Civilization #White #Matter

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

#Hero #People #Larger Than Life

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

#Suicide #Fear #Rooms

Love makes you blind to your own survival. And if it doesn't then it's not love at all.
-- Walter Mosley

#Survival #Blind

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

#Dream #Running #Fear