Walter Mosley Quotes

My novels come from within me; they are things I feel I want to do.

One doesn't make art for other people, even though I am very concerned with the viewer.

If you're writing, you're starting in private. It can really be this amazing, private, freeing experience. Forget that it's for other people - that comes in later.

There are bits of me in all my characters.

I don't care what people say. My music's, my music.

For me as a writer, the story has always taken precedence over everything else. I have never sat down to write with broad, sweeping ideas in mind, and certainly never with a specific agenda.

All I can do is write about whatever grabs me.

There is a certain joy in telling a story, and it gives me great pleasure to be a part of the process from scratch and say it the way I want to.

I just follow what inspires me as an artist and a storyteller, and stay true to myself in my work.

You make art, you make it from what you know, and that's the best way to make art. You get lost in the details and make something that feels like it's yours.

Basically I just had to say, 'Screw everyone around me - from now on I'm just gonna play what I think is important to me and our music.' So I gave the big finger to all the current trends in technical wizardry, and just went off and did what I felt was best for the songs.

All you can do as an artist is do what you think is an extension of you. You put down on paper ... who you are. That's what being an artist is all about. And when it gets done, you don't look back at it and say, Oh, I could have done that better.

I always loved writing songs - writing for myself and demo-ing songs, really with no intention of ever letting anyone else hear them. Finally the Foo Fighters stuff happened when I just went to the studio down the street from my house and recorded some stuff in about five or six days, and all these people wanted to release it as an album. I wanted to release it on my own, with no photos and no names on it.

To a great extent, I still write for myself, write what amuses me. Fortunately, I have a quirky sort of strange sense of humor that appeals to other people and that's good. I still sort of write for myself though there are some areas of the book I feel I have to put in and I feel I have to deliver.

The person you are (in total, at that moment in time) is what creates the story you're writing. It's infused in every piece of punctuation, in the plot, in the most minor character who crosses the page. It's all your voice.

I don't ever try to anticipate my audience. I just write the songs I want to write, and hope people like 'em.

You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.

all creative writers need a certain amount of time when they're creating something where nobody should criticize them at all - at all. Even if the criticism is valid or good, they should just shut up, and let that person create. Because at a certain point you have to make it your own - not the world's, but your own.

The less attention I pay to what people want and the more attention I pay to just writing the book I want to write, the better I do.

When an artist explains what he is doing, he usually has to do one of two things: either scrap what he has explained, or make his work fit in with the explanation.

I always seem to write personal songs; that's always been my go-to thing, to write about what I'm experiencing.

Until I became a published writer, I remained completely ignorant of books on how to write and courses on the subject ... they would have spoiled my natural style; made me observe caution; would have hedged me with rules.

You do not write a novel for praise, or thinking of your audience. You write for yourself; you work out between you and your pen the things that intrigue you

If you don't compromise your gift, if you write each day as well as you can, and then submit your work and not worry about it and go on to the next piece, you suddenly find oddly enough that you're no more interested in the applause than the silence. You don't hear either one of them. You can never listen to the naysayers. If you do you won't survive.

In the beginning, there was a kind of energy that - like an urgency to express myself, and the songs just couldn't be held in. But I think it changes, the nature of how that - what that energy is. And I need to court the muse in a much more serious way.