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.
A man who is already insane was frightening enough, but when he goes crazy...
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.
My hero in comic books is Jack Kirby: ‘Spider-Man,’ ‘Fantastic Four,’ ‘Captain America,’ Marvel Comics. He was really the basis for Marvel Comics.
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.
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.
I think that computer programming shows in my writing. Often when I write about computer programmers I’ll write about the way that they see the world and they structure the world.
I don’t ever know where I’m going. Because one of the wonderful things about writing, which is different than working in programming, you don’t need to know. You could just write and discover where you’re going. And it’s a great deal of fun.
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.
Your book grows. The early part of your book is growing still while you are writing the later part of your book.
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.
When you deal with a person who’s experiencing dementia, you can see where they’re struggling with knowledge. You can see what they forget completely, what they forget but they know what they once knew. You can tell how they’re trying to remember.
Better to listen to the gospel than to a mortal leader.
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.
I would have been completely brainwashed by this lopsided and racist view of the world if it weren’t for my father. He was a deep thinker and an irrepressible problem solver. He was a Black Socrates, asking why and then spoiling ready-made replies.
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.
I’m almost completely without family and it’s a very odd feeling in life. I have no children.
Mouse was the truest friend I ever had. And if there is such a thing as true evil, he was that too.
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.
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.