A Quote by 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.
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When I was a kid, I'd go to the African-American section in the bookstore, and I'd try and find African-American people I hadn't read before. So in that sense the category was useful to me. But it's not useful to me as I write. I don't sit down to write an African-American zombie story or an African-American story about elevators. I'm writing a story about elevators which happens to talk about race in different ways. Or I'm writing a zombie novel which doesn't have that much to do with being black in America. That novel is really about survival.
'Invisible Man' holds such an honored place in African-American literature that Ralph Ellison didn't have to write anything else to break bread with the remembered dead. But he did try to go on, because if a writer has done one great thing, then the pressures to do another are intense.
Ralph Ellison is a classic work of erudition, grace, and elegance. Rampersad offers us an Ellison whose gifts and warts orbit the same universe of creative genius. Like Ellison's work, Rampersad's text wrestles eloquently with difficult truths about race, politics, and American life.
Hopefully, reading and being around great literature inspires me to write songs, but I'm not sure about that.
In real life, I'm so goofy and super weird. I'm never mean, but people don't see the weird side of me. Like, I'll be dancing around. My best friends will always say that they wish others saw that side of me, when I'm doing a weird dance or weird faces or voices.
It's weird because when you initially write a song, you write it with no understanding that the world is maybe going to hear it one day. So when you go into the studio, you don't see the hundreds of people at a gig or the viewers on TV, you just write a song without any inhibitions or boundaries.
I write weird stories. I don't know why I like weirdness so much ... But when I write, I write weird. That's very strange. When I'm getting more and more serious, I'm getting more and more weird.
When I was 16 years old I tried to kill myself because I felt different and that I didn't belong. Now I'm here, and I want this moment to be for that kid who feels weird or different. Stay weird, stay different.
When I say that I can write nothing but weird fiction, I am not trying to exalt that medium but am merely confessing my own weakness. The reason I can't write other kinds is not that I don't value & respect them, but merely that my slender set of endowments does not enable me to extract a compellingly acute personal sense of interest & drama from the natural phenomena of life.
I still go to a party and say something embarrassing to someone, and then write them a weird e-mail about it the next day, and then write them a text because I think they didn't get the e-mail. No matter what happens with your level of success, you still have to deal with all the baggage that is yourself.
It started off for me as just wanting to be an actor and sort of resenting in a weird way being expected to write as well as be a comedian and an improviser. And then you think about it for a minute, and I smartened up and realized that the only way to sustain a career is to generate your own material. Or to be in control of your career as best you can. And in allowing yourself to do that it opens up a whole new world of possibilities. And then you're like "Oh, producing is a thing."
A lot of my books have been that way. My World War II thriller about Sarin gas [Black Cross] was published two months before the Sarin attack in the Japanese subway. There are very weird coincidences out there. And I do have one surefire plot I have not and probably never will write, because of my fear someone will carry it out.
In fact almost everyone in my yearbook wrote the same thing to me: "To weird girl, you're nice." I didn't think it was bad. When I showed my mother she said, "Everyone is different." Being weird became my tool. I'm weird; that's who I am. It was my coping badge.
Who's to say what's better or worse anyway? Who's to even say what's normal or average? We're all different people and we're allowed to be different from on another. If someone ever says you're weird, say thank you. And then curtsy. No, don't curtsy. That might be too weird. Bow. And tip your imaginary hate. That'll show them.
It's so weird to turn on a switch and be the role model for all women, for all African-Americans. That doesn't happen that easily. It just doesn't. And so I don't act up in public and I don't do anything weird - because my sisters are watching me, not because the world is watching me.
It's so weird to turn on a switch and be the role model for all women, for all African-Americans. That doesn't happen that easily. It does not. So I don't act up in public and don't do anything weird, because my sisters are watching me. Not because the world is watching me.
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