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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

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Walter Mosley
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: January 12
Actor
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
LA
California
Walter Ellis Mosley
Great
Good
Bedtime
Time
Published
World
Mediocre
Writers
Writer
Black
Best

More quotes by Walter Mosley

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Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.
Walter Mosley
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I've always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things.
Walter Mosley
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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
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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
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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
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Comic books were telling me what life was about. This was how I kind of entered life, through fiction.
Walter Mosley
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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
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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
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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
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I think of writers as explorers, not necessarily as detectives. So there is certainly detecting that is going on - they're explorers.
Walter Mosley
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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
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I took up writing to escape the drudgery of that every day cubicle kind of war.
Walter Mosley
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Writing is almost a place of dreams for me, and I don't have to give up anything to do it.
Walter Mosley
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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
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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
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All great popular literature today one day will be seen as great literature and will no longer be seen as popular literature.
Walter Mosley
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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
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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
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... We must remember that there's more than one story and plot in every novel. There are at least as many stories as there are main characters, and each of these stories has to have multiple plots to keep it going - blood and bone, nerve and tissue, forgotten longing and unknown events.
Walter Mosley
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Chirren [children] is the most dangerous creatures on the earth, with the exception of young girls between the ages of fifteen and forty-two.
Walter Mosley