A Quote by Colson Whitehead
Zombies are a great rhetorical prop to talk about people and paranoia, and they are a good vehicle for my misanthropy.
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People ask me why my figures have to be so black. There are a lot of reasons. First, the blackness is a rhetorical device. When we talk about ourselves as a people and as a culture, we talk about black history, black culture, black music. That's the rhetorical position we occupy.
The worst part about zombies raging unchecked is the slow paralysis that they induce in people who aren't quite zombies yet. The rest of us un-zombies turn our heads, hoping the ghouls will just go away.
I quickly decided my zombies weren't really zombies. It was instead something you called people who were on this club drug, who then exhibited aggressive behaviors. And then like everyone who writes about zombies, I found it was so much fun.
The step between prudence and paranoia is short and steep. Prudence wears a seat belt. Paranoia avoids cars. Prudence washes with soap. Paranoia avoids human contact. Prudence saves for old age. Paranoia hoards even trash. Prudence prepares and plans, paranoia panics. Prudence calculates the risk and takes the plunge. Paranoia never enters the water.
In any piece of rhetorical discourse, one rhetorical term overcomes another rhetorical term only by being nearer to the term which stands ultimate. There is some ground for calling a rhetorical education necessarily aristocratic education in that the rhetorician has to deal with an aristocracy of notions.
Cars will talk to each other and the world around them to make driving both safer and more efficient. 'Vehicle-to-vehicle' and 'vehicle-to-infrastructure' connectivity will become commonplace.
Zombies are so popular. There's a lot of chaff out there. For every one person who is legitimately passionate about zombies, there are a hundred people who are thinking, 'Hey, I can make a buck off of this.' The problem is that some of their stuff is so lame.
To me, the zombies have always just been zombies. They've always been a cigar. When I first made 'Night of the Living Dead,' it got analyzed and overanalyzed way out of proportion. The zombies were written about as if they represented Nixon's Silent Majority or whatever. But I never thought about it that way.
Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine.
People have a good image of me. It's not these tramps who are going to tarnish my image. They should stop lying to the French people. It annoys me that people talk about 'your image'. My image is great in France. When I'm abroad, I don't even talk about it. But in France it's just these people, these parasites.
But we talk about issues, we talk about people, we talk about personalities. George is a very good reader of people, and he's very perceptive about people, and you know, that's fine.
Zombies aren't about zombies. It's not about the dead bodies. I think it's a very hopeful subgenre. It says that regardless of what happens, humanity will get through it. We'll figure out a way to survive.
I talk about Africa and its meaning, being the birthplace of man and all that great history that's been erased and even hidden. I think it's my duty to be proud and to bring about the conversation that allows us to talk about the great history of my people.
When I started writing, there was nothing about zombies. It was all teen movies, which to me are scarier than zombies, but that's another story.
If there is something comforting - religious, if you want - about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.
I think zombies would fit in anywhere. You can tell any story, and put zombies in it. I don't know how I'd find the backing, but I think it'd be great to make a zombie gangster movie.
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