Colson Whitehead Quotes

I grew up reading the ‘Village Voice‘ and wanting to be one of these multidisciplinary music writers, film writers, book writers. And I lucked out getting a job at the ‘Voice’ right after college.

I admire Vegas‘s purity, its entirely wholesome artificiality.

In ‘John Henry Days,’ I was taking my idea of junketeering and sort of blowing it up to absurd extremes.

I don’t generally follow sports. At an early age, I discovered that nature had apportioned me only a small reserve of enthusiasm. Best to ration.

Zombies are a great rhetorical prop to talk about people and paranoia, and they are a good vehicle for my misanthropy.

Growing up as a product of the black civil-rights movement, I had a lot of different models for black weirdness, whether it’s Richard Pryor or James Baldwin or Jimmy Walker.

In college, I wrote maybe three short stories.

I’m just trying to keep things rich for me creatively and for the readers who follow me.

I have a good poker face because I am half-dead inside.

Generally, I walk around in a glum mood.

In the apocalypse, I think those average, mediocre folks are the ones who are going to live.

I try to keep each different book different from the last. So ‘Sag Harbor‘ is very different from ‘Apex Hides the Hurt;’ ‘The Intuitionist,’ which is kind of a detective novel, is very different from ‘John Henry Days.’ I’m just trying to keep things rich for me creatively and for the readers who follow me.

I love getting out of the Q train at Union Square. It’s such a mix of people, like a party. There’s always an errand you can do along there, whether it’s picking up contacts or buying poker chips.

‘Driving while black’ was taught to me at a young age.

I like questions that tee me up to make weird jokes, frankly.

The readership for ‘Sag Harbor’ was different from people who’d read me before – it was linear and realistic, not as strange as ‘The Intuitionist.’ Did they carry over to ‘Zone One,’ a story about zombies in New York? Some, some not. I’m used to people not caring about my other books.

What isn’t said is as important as what is said.

A lot of my books have started with an abstract premise.

Being a slave meant never having the stability of knowing your family would be together as many years as God designed it to be. It meant you could come back from picking cotton in a field to find that your children are gone, your husband‘s gone, your mother‘s gone.

I never actually went anywhere when I was a journalist. I was a critic, and I just sort of got stuff in the mail and chatted about it.

If you want to understand America, it’s slavery.

I do write about race a lot, but I don’t think writers – of any shade or background or whatever – have to write about certain subjects.

Access to information, to music or any kind of culture, is getting faster and faster and more streamlined. At each juncture, people are thrown into tumult and have to adapt or die.

I wanted to be one of these multidisciplinary critics who is doing music one day, TV the next, and books the next.

Some books are well-received with critics; other books sell.

Part of any book is establishing the rules at the end of the world. My first book, ‘The Intuitionist,’ takes place in an alternative world where elevator inspectors are important, so you have to establish rules, and part of that is, How do people talk? How do they behave?

Part of being in New York is being able to brag about what used to be there.

‘Zone One’ has one kind of an apocalypse, and ‘The Underground Railroad‘ another. In both cases, the narrators are animated by a hope in a better place of refuge – in the last surviving human outpost, Up North. Does it exist? They can only believe.

‘Zone One’ comes out of me trying to work through some of my ideas about why, for me personally, zombies are scary.

A lot of early Misfits song titles are inspired by old B-movies, which were my Popeye’s spinach when I was a kid.

My mom’s mother was from Virginia, but I don’t feel much of a tie. I’m very much anti-South for many, many reasons. Whenever I go down there, people are always looking at me funny, you know.

I like to explore different ideas of race, how the concept of race has evolved in the country. It’s one thing I enjoy talking about, but I don’t feel compelled to talk about it.

There’s not a lot of good TV.

Growing up devouring horror comics and novels, and being inspired to become a writer because of horror novels, movies, and comic books, I always knew I was going to write a horror novel.

It’s always hard to write and get your words out there, to find an editor, a publisher – readers! – who are going to appreciate them.

I was 7 years old when ‘Roots‘ was first broadcast, and my parents gathered all us kids around the TV to learn about how we got here. But it wasn’t until I sat down and immersed myself in the research that I got the barest inkling of what it meant to be a slave.

I started writing in the ’90s, so I was free to just have an eccentric career and not conform to some idea of what a black writer has to do. I didn’t have the burden of representation.

I’m not a teacher; I’m not a historian. I’m trying to create a world for my characters.

The movie ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll High School‘ was a sacred text in my household.

People don’t like it when you compare the miracle of childbirth to writing a book, but I think there is some overlap in the two because they are both pure agony.

I think a joke is a form of truth-telling. A good joke that’s absurd contains elements of our daily darkness and also a possibility to escape that darkness. So, for me, humor is an attempt to capture everyday tragedy and everyday hopeful moments that we experience all of the time.

When I’m working on a book, I try to do eight pages a week. That seems like a good amount. Less than that, I’m not getting a nice momentum, and more than that, I’m probably putting out too much crap.

Monsters are a storytelling tool, like domestic realism and close third.

I enjoy thinking about how race plays out over the centuries, how technology evolves, how cities transform themselves. These subjects are present in some of my books and absent in others.

Each book requires a different kind of treatment and structural gambit.