Walter Mosley > Quotes

“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, Blue Light

“A peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.”
― Walter Mosley, The Long Fall

“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

“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

“A man's bookcase will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about him.”
― Walter Mosley, The Long Fall

“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 Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“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

“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.”
― Walter Mosley, Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore

“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, THE LONG FALL: A NOVEL

“The older you get the more you live in the past”
― Walter Mosley, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“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, Killing Johnny Fry: A Sexistential Novel

“We born dyin'...But you ask a man an' he talk like he gonna live forevah.”
― Walter Mosley, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“I'm not saying that you have to be a reader to save your soul in the modern world. I'm saying it helps.”
― Walter Mosely

“Librarians are wonderful people, partly because they are, on the whole, unaware of how dangerous knowledge is. Karl Marx upended the political landscape of the twentieth century sitting at a library table. Still, modern librarians are more afraid of ingnorance than they are of the potential devastation that knowledge can bring. (p. 192)”
― Walter Mosley, The Long Fall

“The life most of us live are lives we are forced to live by immediate needs, influences, and pressures.”
― Walter Mosley, Black Genius: African-American Solutions to African-American Problems

“The great man say that life is pain," Coydog had said over eighty-five years before. "That mean if you love life, then you love the hurt come along wit' it. Now, if that ain't the blues, I don't know what is.”
― Walter Mosley, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“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

“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, This Year You Write Your Novel

“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, When the Thrill Is Gone

“Rest easy and go with the faith you lived with”
― Walter Mosley

“That’s how Ptolemy imagined the disposition of his memories, his thoughts: they were still his, still in the range of his thinking, but they were, many and most of them, locked on the other side a closed door that he’s lost the key for. So his memory became like secrets held away from his own mind. But these secrets were noisy things; they babbled and muttered behind the door, and so if he listened closely he might catch a snatch of something he once knew well.”
― Walter Mosley, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“If it wasn't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all.”
― 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

“The law," he continued, "is made by the rich people so that the poor people can't get ahead...”
― Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress

“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”
― Walter Mosley

“There are times in your life when things line up and Fate takes a hand in your future," Ptolemy remembered Coydog saying. "When that happens, you got to move quick and take advantage of the sitchiation or you'll never know what might have been."
"How do I know when it's time to move quick?" L'il Pea asked.
"When somethin' big happens and then somethin' else come up.”
― Walter Mosley, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“Sometimes you might forget who you are and where, but that’s okay because there’s always somebody around that’s happy to remind you.”
― Walter Mosley, And Sometimes I Wonder About You

“I'm just a survivor from the train wreck of the modern world.”
― Walter Mosley, Known to Evil

“Love makes you blind to your own survival. And if it doesn't then it's not love at all.”
― Walter Mosley, Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore

“Love, as the poet says, is like the spring. It grows on you and seduces you slowly and gently, but it holds tight like the roots of a tree. You don't know until you're ready to go that you can't move, that you would have to mutilate yourself in order to be free. That's the feeling. It doesn't last, at least it doesn't have to. But it holds on like a steel claw in your chest. Even if the tree dies, the roots cling to you. I've seen men and women give up everything for love that once was.”
― Walter Mosley, The Man in My Basement