85+ Walter Mosley Quotes On Education, Writing And Mysterious

Walter Mosley is an American novelist best known for his crime fiction series featuring the private detective Easy Rawlins. His other works include science fiction, political monographs, and essays on race and social issues. Mosley has won numerous awards for his work, including an O. Henry Award, a Grammy, and an Edgar Award. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Walter Mosley on love, leadership, life.

Top 10 Walter Mosley Quotes

1. Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.
2. My hero in comic books is Jack Kirby: 'Spider-Man,' 'Fantastic Four,' 'Captain America,' Marvel Comics. He was really the basis for Marvel Comics.
3. A man's bookcase will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about him
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. I took up writing to escape the drudgery of that every day cubicle kind of war.
7. I’m not saying that you have to be a reader to save your soul in the modern world. I’m saying it helps.
8. 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.
9. Black men of our day were never told, The sky's the limit. ... We could aspire to Joe Louis but never Henry Ford.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• Mouse was the truest friend I ever had. And if there is such a thing as true evil, he was that too.
• Better to listen to the gospel than to a mortal leader.
• I like to read either in motion or in water... I am happiest reading in the bathtub.
• Our collective freedom... depends on our ability to defend the rights of others.
• The police and I have a deal. I don't talk to them and they don't listen to me.
• The older you get the more you live in the past
• A peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.
• Rest easy and go with the faith you lived with
• We born dyin'...But you ask a man an' he talk like he gonna live forevah.
• Lawyer even sounds like liar.

Walter Mosley Quotes About Love

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

I write every day and I just love doing it. It's just... 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

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

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

I've always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things. — 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 makes you blind to your own survival. And if it doesn't then it's not love at all. — Walter Mosley

Walter Mosley Quotes About Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walter Mosley Quotes About Writing

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

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

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

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

... 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

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

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

Walter Mosley Quotes About Thoughtful

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

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 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

Walter Mosley Quotes About Writer

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

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

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

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

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

I think of writers as explorers, not necessarily as detectives. So there is certainly detecting that is going on - they're explorers. — 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

Walter Mosley Quotes About World

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

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

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

Walter Mosley Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

I think that it's important to try to keep reality. I think that Gabriel Garcia Marquez speaks a lot about reality in his magical realism. So I don't think we have to be hyper-realistic. But we have to understand the pressures that undergird the lives of the characters within that novel. — Walter Mosley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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 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

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

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

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

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

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

... 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

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 love of writing comes at a very early age. For me, for instance, comic books so affected me. And a lot of people who come up to me and start talking about writing, when I start talking to them about the "Fantastic Four," they look at me aghast. They say, "'The Fantastic Four?' That's not literature." I say, "Yeah, but it was when I was 11 years old." This was literature. — Walter Mosley

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

Life Lessons by Walter Mosley

1. Walter Mosley's work emphasizes the importance of understanding the complexities of race, identity, and class in America.
2. He also explores the power of storytelling to bring about social change and to foster empathy and understanding.
3. Through his work, Mosley encourages readers to think critically about the world around them and to strive for a more equitable society.