Walter Mosley Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Walter Mosley quote about:
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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.”
-- Walter Mosley -
“A peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.”
-- 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 -
“Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.”
-- 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 -
“A man's bookcase will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about him”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“I took up writing to escape the drudgery of that every day cubicle kind of war.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“The life most of us live are lives we are forced to live by immediate needs, influences, and pressures.”
-- Walter Mosley -
“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 -
“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 -
“... 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 -
“... 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 -
“I like to read either in motion or in water... I am happiest reading in the bathtub.”
-- 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 -
“Writing is almost a place of dreams for me, and I don't have to give up anything to do it.”
-- 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 -
“Our collective freedom... depends on our ability to defend the rights of others.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“Mouse was the truest friend I ever had. And if there is such a thing as true evil, he was that too.”
-- Walter Mosley -
“Black men of our day were never told, The sky's the limit. ... We could aspire to Joe Louis but never Henry Ford.”
-- Walter Mosley
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