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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

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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
Children
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Easily
Something
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Killing
Always
Girl
Kill
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More quotes by Walter Mosley

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I'm almost completely without family and it's a very odd feeling in life. I have no children.
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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Love makes you blind to your own survival. And if it doesn't then it's not love at all.
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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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
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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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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
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There's a resistance for people to talk about things that make them feel guilty. When natural disasters happen, it's easier not to feel guilty about it.
Walter Mosley
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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
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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
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Science fiction [is] the kind of writing that prepares us for the necessary mutations brought about in society from an ever changing technological world and as a result. The mainstream hasn’t excluded SF the mainstream has excluded itself. No one told Jules Verne he was a science fiction writer, but he invented the 20th century.
Walter Mosley
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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
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The biggest misconception that people have about the literary life is the romance of it. That a writer has this large world available to him or her of people, of ideas, of experiences, of interchange of ideas...
Walter Mosley
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A lot of people... kind of make heroes that are separate from us, people who are, you know, like... John Wayne and Errol Flynn and, you know, Denzel Washington... people who are different, who are larger than 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 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
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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
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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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I believe that a writer has to tell what they think is the truth in a human experience. The truth of the human experience cannot escape the political.
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