Walter Mosley Quotes

I love art that haunts me, that stays with me, that is left embedded in my mind. I don't really think there is any use for owning or collecting art; it is more about remembering and preserving it in the minds eye and allowing it into your cultural DNA.

Every once in a while I feel the tremendous force of the novel. But it does not stay with me.

I do truly believe that the smallest stories can wind up being the biggest because it's through the specific that a writer can best access the universal.

Literature is for the sake of humanity.

Folk tales and myths, they've lasted for a reason. We tell them over and over because we keep finding truths in them, and we keep finding life in them.

If you read a book that's fiction and you get caught in the characters and the plot, and swept away, really, by the fiction of it - by the non-reality - you sometimes wind up changing your reality as well. Often, when the last page is turned, it will haunt you.

What I've learned over the years is that the craft of songwriting is trying to take the personal and make it universal - or in the case of telling a story, taking the universal and making it personal.

Very few stories embody a human truth so definitively that we cannot think of the truth without remembering the story and cannot imagine how people ever got by without it.

I never sit down to write anything personal unless I know the subject is going to go beyond my own experience and address something larger and more universal.

The best fiction stays with you and changes you.

That's why I write fiction, because I want to write these stories that people will read and find universal.

I think any time you have a show that, after you watch it, it sort of sits with you for a while, and you take pause and you talk about it, yeah, it affects your life.

Great art, the more specific you are, the more universal it becomes, and that's the thing that I loved about 'The Wire.'

Stories and narratives are one of the most powerful things in humanity. They're devices for dealing with the chaotic danger of existence.

Novels describe what it means to be alive at a given moment.

To me, something that's beautiful in terms of a book is something that lives inside the reader both as a discrete and complete thing, but also something that seeps out into their life and thoughts.

People want things that address their everyday reality, and that goes for stuff that isn't political - with singer-songwriter music, people want things that touch them.

The great thing about fantasy is that you can drag dreams and longings and hopes and fears and strivings out of your subconscious and call them 'magic' or 'dragons' or 'faeries' and get to know them better. But then I write the stuff. Obviously I'm prejudiced.

A good story transcends boundaries, breaks barriers and opens doors.

Novels can fill in the spaces about what that emotional resonance is.

A good novel begins with a small question and ends with a bigger one.

I think there is something about a story that is enduring. Stories take on a life of their own.

You cannot write to resonate twenty or thirty or forty years from now. You only can write for that very day, but whatever happens is all gravy.

They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.

I believe that written stories will continue to survive because they answer an essential human need. I think movies might disappear before the novel disappears, because the novel is really one of the only places in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.