Walter Mosley Quotes (14 Quotes)

What I say to myself is, 'I really love these characters and I want to make them as real in the world as I can,'

There was a whole black experience from the hippie movement. It's a whole new world.

I think that people don't know how to do anything anymore. My father was a janitor. He could take a car apart and put it back together. He could build a house in the back yard. Today, if you ask people what they know, they say, 'I know how to hire someone.'

I'm talking about black male heroes, ... I'm not the only one doing this but there's not a big genre of black male heroes, who aren't caricatures.

For some people, racism has faded in the background. But not for him. It's still there even when he doesn't experience it. It's become a metaphysical experience in his life.

He's not wild in the way that he once was. He wants a deeper commitment or relationship with a woman.

What I want to do is give people who've been there a chance to recreate that world and those who've haven't been there a chance to create it, ... For a lot of people, it's an alien land, the world of black Los Angeles.

The reason I'm a writer is because I'm a writer. The reason I'm going through all these different genres is I'm trying to lay out a landscape for black male heroes.

Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.

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.

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.

It's a black erotic novel 25 percent of it is explicit sex,

You're talking about poor people whose lives have been destroyed. I'm upset about Katrina. I'm upset that our country follows a conservative economic program that allows poor people to lose their safety net.

At the same time, Mosley struggles to avoid turning his colorful characters into one-dimensional cartoons. One of his recurring characters, Jackson Blue, is a case in point. If there's anybody who's 'street' in the world, it's Jackson Blue, ... But Jackson, he's reading Cicero.