Walter Mosley Quotes

A novelist has a specific poetic license which also applies to his own life.

I'm a big believer in puking out all your thoughts in a single sitting and getting some version of the work down, because the alternative just prolongs the agony. The first draft is hideous and ajskdlkdfksjdfslfjk, but it's just a map for where the big blocks go.

Writing a novel was like I had some Play-Doh to work with and could just keep working with it - doing a million drafts and things changing radically and characters appearing and disappearing and solving mysteries: Why is this thing here? Should I just take that away? And then realizing, no, that is there, in fact, because that is the key to this. I love that sort of detective work, keeping the faith alive until all the questions have been sleuthed out.

What about writing it first and rationalizing it afterwards?

You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.

I never plan. I never know what the next page is going to be..... But that's the fun of writing a novel or a story, because I don't know what's going to happen next.

Don't worry about what you're writing or whether it's good or even whether it makes sense.

There's no really other way to learn writing than by writing. So accelerate that as much as you can. The more you write, the better you'll get. What also helps, though, is walking away from broken stuff. Not everything's going to work. Killing two years of your life trying to resuscitate a dying novel, I don't know. Why not just write a different one? You'll have more ideas. You can't help having ideas.

Sometimes I write less than I'd like but do research. Other times, editor's notes or a copy-edited manuscript or page proofs for a forthcoming novel mean that I need to put my attentions elsewhere for a day or two, but I always come back to writing.

Writing was my route to creative expression, and I needed to write about the things that interested me.

Writing a novel was completely awesome because parts of it could suck and I could throw them away. I didn't have to know the ending until I got there.

Novel-writing is the only place where someone who would have liked to do anything can still do that vicariously.

If you don't like my book, write your own. If you don't think you can write a novel, that ought to tell you something. If you think you can, do. No excuses. If you still don't like my novels, find a book you do like.

I love to write. I write everything across the board - kids' stories and novels and scripts. I actually would like to give that a go; I'd like to try to be a writer.

Nothing beats novel writing because it's complete expression of you. You just control everything. Not even a movie director has that level of control.

I used to think that: whenever I heard that someone had taken 10 years to write a novel, I'd think it must be a big, serious book. Now I think, 'No - it took you one year to write, and nine years to sit around eating Kit Kats.'

I tell my students that with a 200-page novel, you are going to write 100 pages that don't make the final cut. See it as an opportunity, although it took me a while to enjoy that 'lost in the woods' feeling.

I should be concentrating on writing pages.

Being a novelist, you can roam around with a story and indulge yourself.

I get to use fiction as a way to work out my thinking and to delight readers in the process. I can't think of any deal that's better for me, and I'm always so grateful that readers have indulged me as I argue with myself in my stories.

When I wrote my novel, 'The Ministry of Special Cases,' I couldn't even brush my teeth. I had to write in isolation from everything else. I thought a play would take away from my fiction, but the more projects I work on, the more time I have.

When you're a writer and you're an adult, that's something you crave - that limitless imagination and love for worlds that don't exist that you can create.

For myself, I feel more natural writing stories or novels than writing plays. I feel more like myself, like I can express myself better, and like I have a greater clarity about what I want to do.

If I had my druthers, I wouldn't have anyone's words in my script but my own, but if you want complete autonomy, just stick to novels.

Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market - you have one of them making a bolt down the wrong lane; another won't get over the right stile.