Quotes from Walter Mosley

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

Mrs. Turner gripped my baby finger. It's amazing how a man can feel sex anywhere on his body.

I'm sorry he's dead but I am happier, by far, that he lived.

But literacy didn't make you smart, just like, as Twill had already figured out, money didn't make you rich.

I hit him more times than necessary but by then my actions were mostly chemical, like a soldier ant or a teenager in love.

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.

It was a regular family scene. All we had to do was clean up a few murders and a matter of international dope smuggling, then we could move next door to Donna Reed.

I have to agree that most people in America read a kind of a fiction which is not of a high literary calibre. People read for entertainment.

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

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

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.

People are so afraid of dying that they don't even live the little bit of life they have.

That would be like me tellin' a gosling not to migrate down south his first mature season. You got to go. Got to. There's gonna be snakes and foxes, and in your case, [...], there might even be men with guns.

There was something about his grandfather's death, about men who love their sons . . .

That was why so many Jews back then understood the American Negro; in Europe the Jew had been a Negro for more than a thousand years.

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.

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.

had a girlfriend named Lana who told me she loved me but said that her impression of life was that people should live alone, answerable to no one. This, she said, made love a true choice and not a duty that inevitably transmogrified into spite.

I wondered if I could just drop the role I carried like a mantle of a dethroned prince.

I think that the power over death and life is the greatest strength that any person can have. It trumps sex and wealth. If I'm willing to die no one can master me.

I'm just a lie waiting to happen.

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.

Readin' good books is like meetin' a girl you wanna get to know bettah

Money ain't the root of all evil," Coydog had told the boy Li'l Pea, "but it get a hold on some people like vines on a tree or the smell'a fungus on damp sheets. They's some people need money before love or laughter. All you can do is feel sorry for someone like that.