Walter Mosley

"The police and I have a deal. I dont talk to them and they dont listen to me."

"There was a period of time where all the books in the world could fit on this shelf, Walter Mosley said. He was pointing at one modest-size row of books in his Brooklyn home ..."And what people did is they read them over and over again, and they knew them so well, and they learned so much, and it changed them. Now, this shelf represents one second of publishing."

"When you run into Hammett and his political history, you see that he’s explaining what’s wrong with society, the crime of society itself. And how can you be a hero inside that?"

"The DC world was: There’s good and bad, and it’s an absolute thing. But Marvel had characters like the Sub-Mariner, who was a hero to his people and a villain to the surface world. I can have good and bad thoughts, basically. And I loved it. I’ve always loved it."

"There was a desire — it wasn’t a marketing desire, it was ‘I want everybody to read this and to understand it no matter what level they’re at in their own education.’ Robert E. Howard was very well educated, knew a lot of stuff, but you didn’t have to know that to read Conan."

"If I only wrote Easy Rawlins, I might be a lot more successful, money-wise and stuff, but the work would be dead."