Top 164 Quotes & Sayings by Colson Whitehead - Page 2

In college, I wrote maybe three short stories.

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.

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

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.

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

I try to have each book be an antidote to the one before.

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

I didn't know I was a zombie pedant until I started considering what from the zombie canon to keep in 'Zone One' and what to ignore.

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

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

You can't rush inspiration.

If the world's nations can set aside their petty bickering over religion, politics, and territory, certainly I can 'get that Olympic Spirit' and rise above my prejudices.

There's not a lot of good TV.

I'm raising kids, and so much of American culture sustains me and gives me things to think about and work on.

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

If you go to a big publishing house, editorial aside, it's completely white.

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.

I like to know how I'm supposed to feel about things. Just a little clue or hint.

Once I got to college, it seemed that the Hamptons were a little bit too posh for me and didn't represent the kind of values I was embracing in my late teens. So, I didn't go out there, except to visit my parents, for a long time. And then, after 9/11, I discovered it was a nice, mellow place to hang out.

Generally, I walk around in a glum mood.

I write at home. I like to be able to take a nap, watch TV, make a sandwich, and if I wake up and don't feel like working, I'm not going to bang my head on my desk all day: I'll go out and do something else.

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.

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.

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

Early on my career, I figured out that I just have to write the book I have to write at that moment. Whatever else is going on in the culture is just not that important. If you could get the culture to write your book, that would be great. But the culture can't write your book.

I'm of that subset of native New Yorkers who can't drive.

There's always an attack on the sophomore novel from some quarters.

As always, a lot of bad books will be published. Some good books will be published, and you have to seek them out.

I was always into comic books and horror stories and a huge consumer of pop culture. And then I worked for awhile for 'The Village Voice'.

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

I'm always trying to switch voices and genres.

You can raze the old buildings and erect magnificent corporate towers, hose down Port Authority, but you can't change people.

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.

Schools don't teach American history that well, especially a lot of black American history.

Usually, when I write a novel, it takes me about 100 pages to figure out the voice of the narrator.

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

The Declaration of Independence is that sacred American text so full of meaning and purpose and yet quite empty if you examine it and pull it apart because the words 'All Men' exclude a vast number of citizens.

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

In America, when you hear about the Underground Railroad, it's so evocative. You think it's a literal subway for a few minutes before your teacher goes on and describes where it actually was.

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.

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've always thought the Nat Turner story to be very interesting.

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.

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 envied kids who played soccer and football, but that was not my gig.

We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.

Memory is the most malicious cutter of all, preserving, recasting, panning in slow motion across the awful bits so that we retain every detail.

Sanctimony and self-regard are as American as smallpox blankets and supersize meals.

I want to keep growing as a writer. I find myself doing unexpected projects and sort of challenging my idea of where I am in my career, or what I'm supposed to be doing. In fact, I'm not supposed to be doing anything. Just finding projects that are challenging to me. I want to be a writer who keeps growing and figuring out new things and hopefully people will follow me along as I publish these things.

The Declaration of Independence is that sacred American text so full of meaning and purpose and yet quite empty if you examine it and pull it apart because the words "All Men" exclude a vast number of citizens.

Don’t go searching for a subject, let your subject find you. You can’t rush inspiration. … Once your subject finds you, it’s like falling in love. It will be your constant companion. Shadowing you, peeping in your windows, calling you at all hours to leave messages like, Only you understand me.

A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.

As time went on, we learned to arm ourselves in our different ways. Some of us with real guns, some of us with more ephemeral weapons, an idea or improbable plan or some sort of formulation about how best to move through the world. An idea that will let us be. Protect us and keep us safe. But a weapon nonetheless.

Best to let the broken glass be broken glass, let it splinter into smaller pieces and dust and scatter. Let the cracks between things widen until they are no longer cracks but the new places for things. That was where they were now. The world wasn't ending: it had ended and now they were in the new place. They could not recognize it because they had never seen it before.

Most people say, "Show, don't tell," but I stand by Show and Tell, because when writers put their work out into the world, they're like kids bringing their broken unicorns and chewed-up teddy bears into class in the sad hope that someone else will love them as much as they do.

You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.

In other words, fiction is payback for those who have wronged you.

The thing I love about New York is getting lost but not worrying, just wandering and wandering, knowing that there's always a subway only ten blocks away in any direction. There's always a new neighborhood to discover, a new place to lose your bearings in, and yet however alien it seems you can escape. You can always get a cab. All of life's problems can be solved by hailing a cab.

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. It meant knowing you are property that could be sold to the highest bidder, of value only to continue to support the plantation economy.

It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.