Top 100 Walter Mosley Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The idea of being productive, the idea of producing many books is going to lead you toward you becoming a better and better writer.”

— Walter Mosley

52. “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

53. “Your book grows. The early part of your book is growing still while you are writing the later part of your book.”

— Walter Mosley

54. “I destroyed that doll, hoping the sacrifice would somehow reverse time and bring my father back. I was a mad scientist and an angry child.”

— Walter Mosley

55. “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.”

— Walter Mosley

56. “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

57. “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

58. “I’m just a survivor from the train wreck of the modern world.”

— Walter Mosley

59. “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

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

— Walter Mosley

61. “A man can live his whole life following the rules set down by happenstance and the cash-coated bait of security-cosseted morality; an entire lifetime and in the end he wouldn’t have done one thing to be proud of.”

— Walter Mosley

62. “A man who is already insane was frightening enough, but when he goes crazy...”

— Walter Mosley

63. “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

64. “The most important lesson I’ve learned as a writer is that practice of the art is something I must exercise every day. The reason for this constant training is that any idea worth discovering is bigger than my head. The twists and turns, story and plot, characters and character development of a novel cannot be held in a single thought or even in a train of thought. This novel takes up a lot of space and needs room to breathe and evolve.”

— Walter Mosley

65. “THAT WAS IT. A life worth remembering is hell to live.”

— Walter Mosley

66. “It’s the strongest love that makes the greatest treachery. The worst thing you can say to somebody is that you will be there no matter what and then fail to show.”

— Walter Mosley

67. “I know how bad a thing it is to be a slave and I know how terrible it was but I don’t believe that there’s a free person in the whole world that knows how good a cup full of water can taste. Because you have to be a deprived slave, to be kept waiting for your water like we were to really appreciate how good just one swallow can be. When we finally got a drop on our tongues it was like something straight from the hands of the Almighty.”

— Walter Mosley

68. “Asking a Southern woman for plain hospitality was like winking at a leprechaun: She had to give up her pot of gold no matter what.”

— Walter Mosley

69. “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

70. “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

71. “It’s hard for a man to understand a woman because a man just desires her; but women, most of them anyway, desire desire.”

— Walter Mosley

72. “The reader is always looking for two things in the novel: themselves and transcendence.”

— Walter Mosley

73. “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

74. “Maybe that’s what they’re afraid of. Maybe they don’t want these children to make up their own minds. Maybe if they did that, the world would change.”

— Walter Mosley

75. “Writing is almost a place of dreams for me, and I don’t have to give up anything to do it.”

— Walter Mosley

76. “If you want to write believable fiction, you will have to cross over the line of your self-restraint and revel in the words and ideas that you would never express in your everyday life.”

— Walter Mosley

77. “Freedom for us has always been dangerous. Freedom for us has been a crime as far back as our oldest memories. And so whenever we’re feeling liberation we know that there’s somebody nearby with a rope and a collar, a shotgun and a curse.”

— Walter Mosley

78. “I have never thought that I have sacrificed anything being a writer. That might not be true, maybe I have sacrificed something. Maybe I’ve given something up, but I can’t think of it.”

— Walter Mosley

79. “It’s like a door open at the side of the house and this cool breeze is blowing in over the back of my neck. The breeze is Death whispering and that door is open for me to go through anytime I want. And I want to go through. I want the confusion to stop – no, not only confusion but pain too.”

— Walter Mosley

80. “Angel, you got checkout girls in these here grocery stores cain’t feed their own kids right, jazz musicians workin’ for the post office because music don’t pay the charge of admission to a nightclub. You might love your work but one day you wake up and find that your work don’t love you.”

— Walter Mosley

81. “I write every day and I just love doing it. It’s just a wonderful thing. Some of my stories work, some of them don’t work. Some of them are wild and I love them, but they certainly don’t fit into any kind of a normal system that I know about.”

— Walter Mosley

82. “I thought I recognized him but most cops blended into one brutal fist for me after a while.”

— Walter Mosley

83. “Better to listen to the gospel than to a mortal leader.”

— Walter Mosley

84. “But all of those things were possible back then even though nobody.”

— Walter Mosley

85. “It’s a disheartening feeling when you can’t stand the touch of someone but neither can you push them away.”

— Walter Mosley

86. “I never really thought I’d be successful. I never though I’d get books published, but this was something completely beyond me. The fact that it happened is wonderful, but it is not something that I was aiming for.”

— Walter Mosley

87. “Let me speak to your boss” I said. Six magic words that roil deep in the bowels of anymore collecting a paycheck on a biweekly basis. It’s like winking at a leprechaun: he has to give up his pot of gold, and yet no one knows why.”

— Walter Mosley

88. “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

89. “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

90. “I couldn’t see why it shouldn’t be my one hundred dollars.”

— Walter Mosley

91. “But most Americans cannot comprehend the scrutiny that black people have been under since the days we were dragged here in bondage. Those two cops felt fully authorized to stop us with no reason and no warrant. They felt that they could question us and search us and cart us off to jail if there was the slightest flaw in how we explained our business. Even.”

— Walter Mosley

92. “I gave my children the kind of dreams they could live by, but dreams are like oceans, Mr. McGill. If they’re worth a damn they’re bigger than the dreamer, and sometimes, when the one dreaming wants to be as big as what they imagine, the wave pulls’em down.”

— Walter Mosley

93. “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

94. “I think of writers as explorers, not necessarily as detectives. So there is certainly detecting that is going on, but they’re explorers.”

— Walter Mosley

95. “This distinction was very important to him: His mother did love him but not enough to save him.”

— Walter Mosley

96. “My job is writing for people to enjoy and then writing about a broader and a deeper world.”

— Walter Mosley

97. “My father once told me that a great man walks the back roads. He does what’s right every day and no one knows it but those lucky enough to be loved by him.”

— Walter Mosley

98. “People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.”

— Walter Mosley

99. “Sometimes you’re hoping that things will be different, that men and women will change over the years and become those good, if hard, folks that the preachers talk about. But it never changes. And if something does get good for a while you could be sure that it will turn sour before you have time to get any real pleasure.”

— Walter Mosley

100. “Everybody was screaming for joy. That’s what children do – they scream because life is just too much for them but they don’t know it yet.”

— Walter Mosley