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Each book requires a different kind of treatment and structural gambit.
Colson Whitehead -
I usually have two or three ideas floating around. When I have free time, the one I end up thinking most about is the one I end up pursuing.
Colson Whitehead
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I am not sure the issue of race in America will ever be completely solved.
Colson Whitehead -
A lot of early Misfits song titles are inspired by old B-movies, which were my Popeye's spinach when I was a kid.
Colson Whitehead -
In college, I wrote maybe three short stories.
Colson Whitehead -
In '82 and '83, that was the rise of the VCR. Every Friday, my brother and I would go to Crazy Eddie's - which was a video store in Manhattan - and rent five horror movies. And that's basically what we did, basically, for three years. Becoming social misfits.
Colson Whitehead -
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.
Colson Whitehead -
A lot of my books have started with an abstract premise.
Colson Whitehead
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Most of my books have always worked through juxtaposition, jumping through different point of views and time.
Colson Whitehead -
The idea of sacrifice is integral to the John Henry myth. Heroic figures have to die in order for us to have our stories; we live and stand on their bones.
Colson Whitehead -
'Zone One' comes out of me trying to work through some of my ideas about why, for me personally, zombies are scary.
Colson Whitehead -
I wanted to be one of these multidisciplinary critics who is doing music one day, TV the next, and books the next.
Colson Whitehead -
I was allowed to write about race using an elevator metaphor because of Toni Morrison and David Bradley and Ralph Ellison. Hopefully, me being weird allows someone who's 16 and wanting to write inspires them to have their own weird take on the world, and they can see the different kinds of African American voices being published.
Colson Whitehead -
I'm always trying to switch voices and genres.
Colson Whitehead
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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.
Colson Whitehead -
A lot of my writer friends live near me, and that makes people think we just hang around with one another in cafes, trading work and discussing 'Harper's' and what not. But I rarely see them. We're home working.
Colson Whitehead -
If you go to a big publishing house, editorial aside, it's completely white.
Colson Whitehead -
I'm someone who just likes being in my cave and thinking up weird stuff.
Colson Whitehead -
Stephen King in general, as well as films of the apocalypse from the '70s, had a big influence on 'Zone One.'
Colson Whitehead -
I use New York to talk about home, but the ideas in 'Colossus' could be transferred to other cities. The story about Central Park is really about the first day of spring in any park. The Coney Island chapter is really about beaches and summer and heat waves.
Colson Whitehead
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Some people don't like my fiction, because they prefer the nonfiction. But moving around keeps the work fresh for me and, hopefully, for my one or two readers who follow me from book to book!
Colson Whitehead -
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.
Colson Whitehead -
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.
Colson Whitehead -
'Sag Harbor' was a very different book for me. It changed the way I thought about books that I wanted to do.
Colson Whitehead