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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
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Good
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Published
World
Mediocre
Writers
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Black
More quotes by Walter Mosley
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
I like to read either in motion or in water... I am happiest reading in the bathtub.
Walter Mosley
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
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
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.
Walter Mosley
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.
Walter Mosley
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.
Walter Mosley
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
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.
Walter Mosley
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.
Walter Mosley
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.
Walter Mosley
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.
Walter Mosley
Black men of our day were never told, The sky's the limit. ... We could aspire to Joe Louis but never Henry Ford.
Walter Mosley
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
Every day that we wake up is a good day. Every breath that we take is filled with hope for a better day. Every word that we speak is a chance to change what is bad into something good.
Walter Mosley
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
Lawyer even sounds like liar.
Walter Mosley
Mouse was the truest friend I ever had. And if there is such a thing as true evil, he was that too.
Walter Mosley
Comic books were telling me what life was about. This was how I kind of entered life, through fiction.
Walter Mosley
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
