Quotes from Walter Mosley

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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

When I turned 59, I looked at that as the first day of my 60th year, so I've been 60 for the last 365 days, in my opinion. So I've been thinking all this year, I'm 60 - this is the time when I need to get some stuff done.

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.

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

We live in capitalism, and capitalism is defined by the production line, and the production line is defined by specificity. If you see yourself as an artist, which I do, then you can't be limited by that. You can't let somebody tell you, 'Well, you can only draw this kind of picture or write that kind of book.'

My hero in comic books is Jack Kirby: 'Spider-Man,' 'Fantastic Four,' 'Captain America,' Marvel Comics. He was really the basis for Marvel Comics.

A man's bookcase will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about him

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.

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

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.'

Chirren is the most dangerous creatures on the earth, with the exception of young girls between the ages of fifteen and forty-two.

The government isn't real, he replied. He might have been talking about Santa Claus or God. I don't owe anything to anyone who in themselves are lies and liars.

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?

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.

When you get old you begin to understand that no one talks unless someone listens, and no one knows nuthin' less somebody else can understand.

Better to listen to the gospel than to a mortal leader.

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

Trustin' a woman is like walkin' in California," Coydog would say. "You know there's bound to be a quake sometimes but you just keep on walkin' anyways. What else could you do?

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