Walter Mosley
21 quotes
Biography
Walter Ellis Mosley is an American novelist, most widely recognized for his crime fiction. He has written a series of best-selling historical mysteries featuring the hardboiled detective Easy Rawlins, a private investigator living in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California.
"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."
"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."
"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..."
"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."
"Lawyer even sounds like liar."
"The police and I have a deal. I don't talk to them and they don't listen to me."
"There was a period of time where all the books in the world could fit on this shelf,' Walter Mosley said. He was pointing at one modest-size row of books in his Brooklyn home ..."And what people did is they read them over and over again, and they knew them so well, and they learned so much, and it changed them. Now, this shelf represents one second of publishing."
"The DC world was: There’s good and bad, and it’s an absolute thing. But Marvel had characters like the Sub-Mariner, who was a hero to his people and a villain to the surface world. I can have good and bad thoughts, basically. And I loved it. I’ve always loved it."
"When you run into Hammett and his political history, you see that he’s explaining what’s wrong with society, the crime of society itself. And how can you be a hero inside that?"
"There was a desire — it wasn’t a marketing desire, it was ‘I want everybody to read this and to understand it no matter what level they’re at in their own education.’ Robert E. Howard was very well educated, knew a lot of stuff, but you didn’t have to know that to read Conan."
"If I only wrote Easy Rawlins, I might be a lot more successful, money-wise and stuff, but the work would be dead."
"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."
"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.'"
"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."
"Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity."
"I took up writing to escape the drudgery of that every day cubicle kind of war."
"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"
"I destroyed that doll, hoping the sacrifice would somehow reverse time and bring my father back. I was a mad scientist and an angry child."
"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."
"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."
"He made me question what was, when for a whole lifetime up till that moment, I accepted the world’s excuses."