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

Colson Whitehead

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Colson Whitehead
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead
Solid
Real
Yorker

More quotes by Colson Whitehead

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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.
Colson Whitehead
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A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.
Colson Whitehead
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The city knows you better than any living person because it has seen you when you are alone.
Colson Whitehead
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Talking about New York is a way of talking about the world.
Colson Whitehead
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I write books and either people read them or they don't read them. The rise of Facebook or e-books doesn't change the difficulty level of writing sentences and thinking up new ideas.
Colson Whitehead
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Memory is the most malicious cutter of all, preserving, recasting, panning in slow motion across the awful bits so that we retain every detail.
Colson Whitehead
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I think the world's big enough for all kinds of zombies. You can have yours and I can have mine. I think by going with slow zombies I maybe have been asserting my own kind of zombie snobbery, but I don't begrudge the youngsters their tackling, running, jumping zombies.
Colson Whitehead
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We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.
Colson Whitehead
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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.
Colson Whitehead
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In terms of why everything is different, each book is different than the one before because I'm so bored of what I just finished I want to work on something different. The next book becomes an antidote to what I did before.
Colson Whitehead
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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.
Colson Whitehead
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I can't blame modern technology for my predilection for distraction, not after all the hours I've spent watching lost balloons disappear into the clouds. I did it before the Internet, and I'll do it after the apocalypse, assuming we still have helium and weak-gripped children.
Colson Whitehead
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A society manufactures the heroes it requires.
Colson Whitehead
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I think being a writer was a crappy job when you just had typewriters. It was crappy when we just had ink and paper. And it's sort of crappy now. It's always just you and the page. That doesn't change.
Colson Whitehead
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If I have three ideas and I'm working on one more than the others, that sort of tells me that I should work on that one.
Colson Whitehead
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I'm not really up on what's new. I'm still listening to Run DMC twenty-five years later. In the same way that the baby-boomers in America were forcing '60s music and Motown down our throats, now people of my generation are forcing Tears For Fears and old Hip Hop upon others.
Colson Whitehead
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In other words, fiction is payback for those who have wronged you.
Colson Whitehead
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In the 1930s, the government paid writers to interview 80- and 90-year-old former slaves, and I read those accounts. I came away realizing - not surprisingly - that many slave masters were sadists who spent a lot of time thinking up creative ways of hurting people.
Colson Whitehead
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There will be no redemption because the men who run this place do not want redemption. They want to be as near to hell as they can.
Colson Whitehead
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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.
Colson Whitehead