Top 100 Walter Mosley Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “Lawyer even sounds like liar.”

— Walter Mosley

3. “A peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.”

— Walter Mosley

Featured in: Reading Quotes

4. “A man’s bookcase will tell you everything you’ll ever need to know about him.”

— Walter Mosley

5. “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

6. “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

7. “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.”

— Walter Mosley

8. “When you talk about painters and you talk about painters painting masterpieces, there is no painter who painted only one painting and that was a masterpiece. You have to do a whole bunch of paintings to get to the place of mastering your craft.”

— Walter Mosley

9. “The police and I have a deal. I don’t talk to them and they don’t listen to me.”

— Walter Mosley

10. “I’m almost completely without family and it’s a very odd feeling in life. I have no children.”

— Walter Mosley

11. “The law,” he continued, “is made by the rich people so that the poor people can’t get ahead...”

— Walter Mosley

12. “All writing is that structure of revelation. There’s something you want to find out. If you know everything up front in the beginning, you really don’t need to read further if there’s nothing else to find out.”

— Walter Mosley

13. “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

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

— Walter Mosley

15. “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

16. “I think that it’s important to try to keep reality. I think that Gabriel Garcia Marquez speaks a lot about reality in his magical realism. So I don’t think we have to be hyper-realistic. But we have to understand the pressures that undergird the lives of the characters within that novel.”

— Walter Mosley

17. “I think that computer programming shows in my writing. Often when I write about computer programmers I’ll write about the way that they see the world and they structure the world.”

— Walter Mosley

18. “Comic books were telling me what life was about. This was how I kind of entered life, through fiction.”

— Walter Mosley

19. “Love makes you blind to your own survival. And if it doesn’t then it’s not love at all.”

— Walter Mosley

20. “I laugh, that there’s a certain kind of cyclical nature to life and that I don’t have to worry because whatever isn’t there right now, it’s coming back again.”

— Walter Mosley

21. “Rest easy and go with the faith you lived with.”

— Walter Mosley

22. “People don’t understand how hard it is to get recognized, how hard it is to get people to read your books. How hard it is to get people to even to understand what they’re reading when they’re talking to you about their books.”

— Walter Mosley

23. “My experience of people in dementia is that a lot of their personality, a lot of their knowledge, a lot of their experience is still there but there’s not a direction connection that they can just reach out and get it and then bring it back.”

— Walter Mosley

24. “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

25. “My heart was beating like it was being played by a one-armed Japanese Ondekoza drummer pounding slowly on his seven-hundred-pound drum with a caveman’s club at twilight.”

— Walter Mosley

26. “All great popular literature today one day will be seen as great literature and will no longer be seen as popular literature.”

— Walter Mosley

27. “The law is a flexible thing – on both sides of the line – influenced by circumstance, character, and, of course, wealth or lack of same.”

— Walter Mosley

28. “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

29. “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

30. “Literature is the adventure. It’s the story, it’s the fight, it’s people falling in love, it’s people with deep personality disorders who succeed anyway beyond themselves. That’s what great literature is.”

— Walter Mosley

31. “I always tell people, if a young girl read “Beloved” as her first novel, she’d have to kill either herself or her mother, because in “Beloved” you have a mother killing their children. This is not something a child would accept very easily. And would never understand.”

— Walter Mosley

32. “At one time if you were a black writer you had to be one of the best writers in the world to be published. You had to be great. Now you can be good. Mediocre. And that’s good.”

— Walter Mosley

33. “The person who controls history controls their fate. The man who can tell you what happened, or did not happen, is lord and master of all he surveys.”

— Walter Mosley

34. “The older you get the more you live in the past.”

— Walter Mosley

35. “A man once told me that you step out of your door in the morning, and you are already in trouble. The only question is, are you on top of that trouble or not?”

— Walter Mosley

36. “Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.”

— Walter Mosley

37. “Purely the idea of writing a lot of books doesn’t make you a great writer, but it might be that the process of doing a lot of writing will make you a much better writer.”

— Walter Mosley

38. “Losing my parents really set me adrift in more ways than one. It’s not just losing them. It’s losing the possibility of family.”

— Walter Mosley

39. “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

40. “Blood may be thicker than water, but family has them both beat.”

— Walter Mosley

41. “You can’t fight with death, all you can do is stand your ground and hope that the foundation don’t fall out from under you.”

— Walter Mosley

42. “The fear in my heart was like in one of those dreams where you try to run but you can’t do it, you can’t run because the fear is an anchor in your chest.”

— Walter Mosley

43. “If everybody in the world despises you and hates you, sees your features as ugly and simian, makes jokes about your ways of talking, calls you stupid and beneath contempt; if you have no history, no heroes, and no future where a hero might lead, then you might begin to hate yourself... And then one hot summer’s night you just erupt and go burning and shooting and nobody seems to know why.”

— Walter Mosley

44. “The way I write is this: I write about a thousand words a day, a little bit more. The next morning, I read those thousand words and cursorily edit that. Then I write the next thousand. I do that all the way to the end of the book and then I reread the book quite a few times, editing as go through.”

— Walter Mosley

45. “He said that a men’s work cloths are the only real cloths he has.”

— Walter Mosley

46. “I believe that a writer has to tell what they think is the truth in a human experience. The truth of the human experience cannot escape the political.”

— Walter Mosley

47. “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

48. “Mouse was the truest friend I ever had. And if there is such a thing as true evil, he was that too.”

— Walter Mosley

49. “A lot of people love their hate. They live to hate the people wronged them. You cain’t just have one gang. That don’t even make sense. If you took away the white man’s black man or the black man’s white man, most of ’em wouldn’t even know how to walk down the street right.”

— Walter Mosley

50. “I would have been completely brainwashed by this lopsided and racist view of the world if it weren’t for my father. He was a deep thinker and an irrepressible problem solver. He was a Black Socrates, asking why and then spoiling ready-made replies.”

— Walter Mosley