Top 95 Quotes & Sayings by Walter Mosley - Page 2

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.

We born dyin'...But you ask a man an' he talk like he gonna live forevah.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I write every day and I just love doing it. It's just... 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.

The police and I have a deal. I don't talk to them and they don't listen to me.

One wouldn't want to say that what makes a good writer is the number of books that the writer wrote because you could write a whole number of bad books. Books that don't work, mediocre books, or there's a whole bunch of people in the pulp tradition who have done that. They just wrote... and actually they didn't write a whole bunch of books, they just wrote one book many times.

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.

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.

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

One of the things that I love about being a writer is this. I wake up every day and I write for three hours. I wake up early. So like 6:00, 7:00 in the morning, I write till 9:00 or 10:00. I live in New York, nobody even is breathing until 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning. So, it's like my writing life is completely removed from the rest of my life.

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.

I like to read either in motion or in water... I am happiest reading in the bathtub.

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

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.

Black men of our day were never told, The sky's the limit. ... We could aspire to Joe Louis but never Henry Ford.

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

HBO and I have a deal to at least try to make a television series from the Leonid McGill stories. We're going to start with the first novel, 'The Long Fall'.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

The idea of being productive, the idea of producing many books is going to lead you toward you becoming a better and better writer.

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.

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.

The love of writing comes at a very early age. For me, for instance, comic books so affected me. And a lot of people who come up to me and start talking about writing, when I start talking to them about the "Fantastic Four," they look at me aghast. They say, "'The Fantastic Four?' That's not literature." I say, "Yeah, but it was when I was 11 years old." This was literature.

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

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.

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.