Walter Mosley
Walter Mosley
Walter Ellis Mosleyis an American novelist, most widely recognized for his crime fiction. He has written a series of best-selling historical mysteries featuring the hard-boiled detective Easy Rawlins, a black private investigator and World War II veteran living in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles; they are perhaps his most popular works...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth12 January 1952
CityLos Angeles, CA
CountryUnited States of America
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.
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.
You're talking about poor people whose lives have been destroyed,
Young people live exactly today... and they live in the immediacy of their world. And it's important for us, people from older generations to realize that a lot of our values, a lot of our truths are no longer truths, are no longer valuable.
My job is writing for people to enjoy and then writing about a broader and a deeper world.
A lot of people... kind of make heroes that are separate from us, people who are, you know, like... John Wayne and Errol Flynn and, you know, Denzel Washington... people who are different, who are larger than life.
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.
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.'
My experience of people in dementia is that a lot of their personality, a lot of their knowledge, a lot of their experience is still there but there's not a direction connection that they can just reach out and get it and then bring it back.
The biggest misconception that people have about the literary life is the romance of it. That a writer has this large world available to him or her of people, of ideas, of experiences, of interchange of ideas.
Octavia Butler has been a beacon for thousands of us. This award will continue her legacy making sure that others will find their way to harbor.
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.
It's 1966, Easy has to come to San Francisco,
It's a black erotic novel 25 percent of it is explicit sex,