Walter Mosley Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

Time is like a river," Coydog had told the boy. "It come up behind ya hard and just keep right on goin'. You couldn't stop it no more than you could fly away. — Walter Mosley

When you talk about painters and you talk about painters painting masterpieces, there is no painter who painted only one painting and that was a masterpiece. You have to do a whole bunch of paintings to get to the place of mastering your craft. — Walter Mosley

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

It's a disheartening feeling when you can't stand the touch of someone but neither can you push them away. — Walter Mosley

My job is writing for people to enjoy and then writing about a broader and a deeper world. — Walter Mosley

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

The girl was cinnamon colored in the way of Native America after it had been raped by Europe. — Walter Mosley

You know, one of the interesting things you find about writing fiction is that any fiction you write has to be political. Otherwise, it goes into the realm of fantasy. So like, if you write about a woman in America in 1910, if you don't write that she can't really control her property, that she can't - doesn't have any say over her children, that she can't vote - if you don't put that in it, then it's a fantasy. Like, well, how is her life informed? That's true about everybody. If you write about black people, you write about white men, I mean, it has to be political. A lot of people don't realize that, it seems. — Walter Mosley

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

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

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

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

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

I wondered if I could just drop the role I carried like a mantle of a dethroned prince. — Walter Mosley

If there's another writer, like Ross McDonald or Raymond Chandler, and all they're writing are mysteries, they won't be accepted," he said. "And that's problematic. A lot of so-called literary novels are just not very good. They're not well-written, they're not well-thought-out. They have pyrotechnics of intelligence.
"On the other hand, some of the best writers and speculative ideas are in science-fiction. The science-fiction genre is completely, completely segregated. And these people are writing good stuff. They're writing about where you're going, which means they're talking about where you are. — Walter Mosley

The law," he continued, "is made by the rich people so that the poor people can't get ahead ... — Walter Mosley

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

It's not that racism doesn't exist. Lots of people in New York, and elsewhere, hate because of color and gender, religion and national origin. It's just that I rarely worry about those things because there's a real world underneath all that nonsense; a world that demands my attention almost every second of the day.
Racism is a luxury in a world where resources are scarce, where economic competition is an armed sport, in a world where even the atmosphere is plotting against you. In an arena like that racism is more of a halftime entertainment, a favorite sitcom when the day is done. — Walter Mosley

If everybody in the world despises you and hates you, sees your features as ugly and simian, makes jokes about your ways of talking, calls you stupid and beneath contempt; if you have no history, no heroes, and no future where a hero might lead, then you might begin to hate yourself.... And then one hot summer's night you just erupt and go burning and shooting and nobody seems to know why. — Walter Mosley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I inhaled deeply, feeling of two minds about the benefits and detriments of smoking. On one hand, tobacco robbed me of my wind, but on the other, it gave me something to do while the devil was tempting me! — Walter Mosley

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

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

Librarians are wonderful people, partly because they are, on the whole, unaware of how dangerous knowledge is. Karl Marx upended the political landscape of the twentieth century sitting at a library table. Still, modern librarians are more afraid of ingnorance than they are of the potential devastation that knowledge can bring. (p. 192) — Walter Mosley

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

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

I couldn't see why it shouldn't be my one hundred dollars. — Walter Mosley

This distinction was very important to him: His mother did love him but not enough to save him. — Walter Mosley

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

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

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

If it wasn't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all. — Walter Mosley

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

One of the things that I love about being a writer is this. I wake up every day and I write for three hours. I wake up early. So like 6:00, 7:00 in the morning, I write till 9:00 or 10:00. I live in New York, nobody even is breathing until 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning. So, it's like my writing life is completely removed from the rest of my life. — Walter Mosley

I don't give a fuck what you're trying to do or what you want. I'd send your ass away if you were a white man with a red ribbon tied around your dick. — Walter Mosley

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

He made me question what was, when for a whole lifetime up till that moment, I accepted the world's excuses. — Walter Mosley

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

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

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

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

They want to hold on to you and your people. They have isolated the ones who might grow powerful and overthrow their debauched reign. — Walter Mosley

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

But at night we began dreaming of Man's perfect world without humanity (57) — Walter Mosley

He said that a men's work cloths are the only real cloths he has. — Walter Mosley

The reader is always looking for two things in the novel: themselves and transcendence. — Walter Mosley

There was something about his grandfather's death, about men who love their sons ... — Walter Mosley

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

There are times in your life when things line up and Fate takes a hand in your future," Ptolemy remembered Coydog saying. "When that happens, you got to move quick and take advantage of the sitchiation or you'll never know what might have been."
"How do I know when it's time to move quick?" L'il Pea asked.
"When somethin' big happens and then somethin' else come up. — Walter Mosley

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

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

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

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

One wouldn't want to say that what makes a good writer is the number of books that the writer wrote because you could write a whole number of bad books. Books that don't work, mediocre books, or there's a whole bunch of people in the pulp tradition who have done that. They just wrote ... and actually they didn't write a whole bunch of books, they just wrote one book many times. — Walter Mosley

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

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

But all of those things were possible back then even though nobody — Walter Mosley

- I was an American citizen too; a citizen who had to watch his step, a citizen who had to distrust the police and the government, public opinion, and even the history taught in schools. It was odd that such negative thoughts would invigorate me. But knowing the truth, no matter how bad it was, gave you some chance, a little bit of an edge. — Walter Mosley

People don't understand how hard it is to get recognized, how hard it is to get people to read your books. How hard it is to get people to even to understand what they're reading when they're talking to you about their books. — Walter Mosley

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

We will be one step down from the Creator," she said, her olive-hued face tightening into an expression that she considered dramatic. "Imagining a world and then making it. — Walter Mosley

Lawyer even sounds like liar. — Walter Mosley

Oster blender. I poured that concoction into a griddle of sizzling butter, then sprinkled diced strawberries on the wet side. Three — Walter Mosley

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

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

Young people live exactly today ... and they live in the immediacy of their world. And it's important for us, people from older generations to realize that a lot of our values, a lot of our truths are no longer truths, are no longer valuable. — Walter Mosley

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

All great popular literature today one day will be seen as great literature and will no longer be seen as popular literature. — Walter Mosley

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

Mrs. Turner gripped my baby finger.
It's amazing how a man can feel sex anywhere on his body. — Walter Mosley

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

Comic books were telling me what life was about. This was how I kind of entered life, through fiction. — Walter Mosley

Blood may be thicker than water, but family has them both beat. — Walter Mosley

I have to agree that most people in America read a kind of a fiction which is not of a high literary calibre. People read for entertainment. — Walter Mosley

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

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

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

Kit [Carson Kitteridge] watched me for a few moments before saying, "That was some impressive killing you did. Naked too."
"I hope I didn't embarrass Office Palmer."
"She said that after all she heard about you she thought your johnson would be bigger."
"Tell her that the air conditioner was on. — Walter Mosley

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

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

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

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

Your book grows. The early part of your book is growing still while you are writing the later part of your book. — Walter Mosley

We live in capitalism, and capitalism is defined by the production line, and the production line is defined by specificity. If you see yourself as an artist, which I do, then you can't be limited by that. You can't let somebody tell you, 'Well, you can only draw this kind of picture or write that kind of book.' — Walter Mosley

THERE ARE FEW THINGS as beautiful as a glass bottle filled with deep amber whiskey. Liquor shines when the light hits it, reminiscent of precious things like jewels and gold. But whiskey is better than some lifeless bracelet or coronet. Whiskey is a living thing capable of any emotion that you are. It's love and deep laughter and brotherhood of the type that bonds nations together. Whiskey is your friend when nobody else comes around. And whiskey is solace that holds you tighter than most lovers can. I thought all that while looking at my sealed bottle. And I knew for a fact that it was all true. True the way a lover's pillow talk is true. True the way a mother's dreams for her napping infant are true. But the whiskey mind couldn't think its way out of the problems I had. So I took Mr. Seagram's, put him in his box, and placed him up on the shelf where he belonged. — Walter Mosley

I used to worry about money and career and what was going to happen. How was I gonna succeed or fail in the world? And I thought about it enough that I'm no longer worried about it. I'm not ... I don't worry about what's gonna happen in my life. I don't worry about telling me about dying, my own mortality. That's a given. — Walter Mosley

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

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