205 Quotes by Walter Mosley

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.

I’m just a survivor from the train wreck of the modern world.

You can’t fight with death, all you can do is stand your ground and hope that the foundation don’t fall out from under you.

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.

The older you get the more you live in the past.

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.

The process of writing a novel is like taking a journey by boat. You have to continually set yourself on course. If you get distracted or allow yourself to drift, you will never make it to the destination. It’s not like highly defined train tracks or a highway; this is a path that you are creating discovering. The journey is your narrative. Keep to it and there will be a tale told.

The reader is always looking for two things in the novel: themselves and transcendence.

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.