Quote

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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Colson Whitehead
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead
Every
Motion
Slow
Recasting
Awful
Cutter
Details
Cutters
Memory
Malicious
Across
Preserving
Memories
Retain
Bits
Detail

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Talking about New York is a way of talking about the world.
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In other words, fiction is payback for those who have wronged you.
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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.
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You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.
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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.
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A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.
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His legs remembered the correct position for squatting down with toys. He played. He fit the round male studs into the round female grooves. He got some thinking done as he hunkered down on his fallen-sleep legs.
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We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.
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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.
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I'd never been much of an athlete, due to a physical condition I'd had since birth (unathleticism). Perhaps if there were a sport centered around lying on your couch in a neurotic stupor all day, I'd take an interest.
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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.
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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.
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It is failure that guides evolution perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.
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I'm trying to keep it fresh for me. I'm just trying to not bore myself. And if I can do a detective novel, and if I can do a horror novel, then why do it again? To keep the work challenging I have to keep moving.
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A society manufactures the heroes it requires.
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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.
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The city knows you better than any living person because it has seen you when you are alone.
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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.
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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.
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As I get older and write more books I'm definitely allowing the humorous side of my personality more rein in my work.
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