Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Walter Mosley
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: January 12
Actor
Film Producer
Novelist
Playwright
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
LA
California
Walter Ellis Mosley
Never
Tell
Accept
Would
Mother
Accepting
People
Young
Novel
Firsts
Either
First
Child
Beloved
Children
Read
Easily
Something
Understand
Killing
Always
Girl
Kill

More quotes by Walter Mosley

Image
A peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.
Walter Mosley
Image
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
Image
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.
Walter Mosley
Image
The first thing you have to know about writing is that it is something you must do everyday. There are two reasons for this rule: Getting the work done and connecting with your unconscious mind.
Walter Mosley
Image
We are not trapped or locked up in these bones. No, no. We are free to change. And love changes us. And if we can love one another, we can break open the sky.
Walter Mosley
Image
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.
Walter Mosley
Image
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.
Walter Mosley
Image
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
Image
... 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
Image
Young people live exactly today... and they live in the immediacy of their world. And it's important for us, people from older generations to realize that a lot of our values, a lot of our truths are no longer truths, are no longer valuable.
Walter Mosley
Image
I think that it's important to try to keep reality. I think that Gabriel Garcia Marquez speaks a lot about reality in his magical realism. So I don't think we have to be hyper-realistic. But we have to understand the pressures that undergird the lives of the characters within that novel.
Walter Mosley
Image
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
Image
My father always taught by telling stories about his experiences. His lessons were about morality and art and what insects and birds and human beings had in common. He told me what it meant to be a man and to be a Black man. He taught me about love and responsibility, about beauty, and how to make gumbo.
Walter Mosley
Image
That's how powerful you are, girl...You pretty, but pretty alone is not what people see. You the kinda pretty, the kinda beauty, that's like a mirror. Men and women see themselves in you, only now they so beautiful that they can't bear to see you go.
Walter Mosley
Image
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
Image
Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.
Walter Mosley
Image
My job is writing for people to enjoy and then writing about a broader and a deeper world.
Walter Mosley
Image
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
Image
I used to worry about money and career and what was going to happen. How was I gonna succeed or fail in the world? And I thought about it enough that I'm no longer worried about it. I'm not... I don't worry about what's gonna happen in my life. I don't worry about telling me about dying, my own mortality. That's a given.
Walter Mosley
Image
We born dyin'...But you ask a man an' he talk like he gonna live forevah.
Walter Mosley