Walter Mosley

Novelist

1952-01-12

Quotes by Walter Mosley

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

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

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

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• 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.

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• Blood may be thicker than water, but family has them both beat.

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• 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.

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• A man's bookcase will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about him.

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• Chirren is the most dangerous creatures on the earth, with the exception of young girls between the ages of fifteen and forty-two.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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...

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• 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.

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• 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.

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

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• 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

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• 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...

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