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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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Colson Whitehead
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead
Everything
Book
Antidote
Different
Bored
Work
Finished
Something
Terms
Becomes
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More quotes by Colson Whitehead
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
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.
Colson Whitehead
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
We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.
Colson Whitehead
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
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
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
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.
Colson Whitehead
In other words, fiction is payback for those who have wronged you.
Colson Whitehead
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.
Colson Whitehead
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
The city knows you better than any living person because it has seen you when you are alone.
Colson Whitehead
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
I always have a few ideas that are percolating, and then after I've finished a book and it's a year later, and things are sort of festering and things are disgusting in my house and I have to get back to work, whatever project I keep thinking about is the one I end up working on. Sort of a very simple process of elimination.
Colson Whitehead
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
A society manufactures the heroes it requires.
Colson Whitehead
It is failure that guides evolution perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.
Colson Whitehead
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
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
You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.
Colson Whitehead
