Walter Mosley Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  Walter Mosley (2003). “What Next: A Memoir Toward World Peace”, p.131, Black Classic Press

  32 Copy quote

• A peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.

  Walter Mosley

  Waiting, Peasants

  Walter Mosley (2009). “The Long Fall: The First Leonid McGill Mystery”, p.78, Penguin

  42 Copy quote

• 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

  Walter Mosley, Katrina Kenison (2003). “The Best American Short Stories 2003”, p.15, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  47 Copy quote

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

  Walter Mosley

  Book, Men, Needs

  Walter Mosley (2009). “The Long Fall: The First Leonid McGill Mystery”, p.78, Penguin

  25 Copy quote

• 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

  Change, Sky, And Love

  Walter Mosley (2013). “Blue Light”, p.346, Open Road Media

  11 Copy quote

• Our collective freedom... depends on our ability to defend the rights of others.

  Walter Mosley

  Freedom, Rights, Ability

  Walter Mosley (2003). “What Next?: A Memoir Toward World Peace”

  13 Copy quote

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

  Walter Mosley

  Needs, Pressure, Influence

  18 Copy quote

• 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

  Walter Mosley (2009). “This Year You Write Your Novel”, p.10, Hachette UK

  20 Copy quote

• 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

  Walter Mosley (2009). “This Year You Write Your Novel”, p.7, Hachette UK

  22 Copy quote

• Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.

  Walter Mosley

  Metaphor, Teach, Condensation

  65 Copy quote

• The older you get the more you live in the past

  Walter Mosley

  Past

  Walter Mosley (2010). “The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey”, p.124, Penguin

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  FaceBook post by Walter Mosley from Oct 18, 2012

  12 Copy quote

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

  Walter Mosley

  War, Writing, Cubicles

  19 Copy quote

• 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

  People, Important, Generations

  Big Think Interview with Andrew Dermont, bigthink.com. November 10, 2010.

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  19 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Ideas, People, Romance

  "Big Think Interview With Walter Mosley". Interview with Andrew Dermont, bigthink.com. November 10, 2010.

  14 Copy quote

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

  Walter Mosley

  Survival, Blind, Ifs

  Walter Mosley (2014). “Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore: A Novel”, p.139, Vintage

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Ideas, Stories

  Big Think Interview with Andrew Dermont, bigthink.com. November 10, 2010.

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Walter Mosley (2012). “All I Did Was Shoot My Man: A Leonid McGill Mystery”, p.188, Penguin

  6 Copy quote

• 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, Different

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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, People

  58 Copy quote

• I'm just a survivor from the train wreck of the modern world.

  Walter Mosley

  Train Wrecks, Survivor, World

  Walter Mosley (2010). “Known to Evil: A Leonid McGill Mystery”, p.21, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

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