There are good writers and bad writers. It’s hard to find writers who really speak to you, but the work is out there. Colson Whitehead Read Quote
I enjoy thinking about how race plays out over the centuries, how technology evolves, how cities transform themselves. These subjects are present in some of my books and absent in others. Colson Whitehead Read Quote
A lot of early Misfits song titles are inspired by old B-movies, which were my Popeye’s spinach when I was a kid. Colson Whitehead Read Quote
If self-absorption, vague yearnings, and a nagging sense of incompleteness are sins, then surely I will burn for all eternity, and I will save you a seat. Colson Whitehead Read Quote
I knew that a zombie book would not particularly appeal to some of my previous readers, but it was artistically compelling, and being able to do a short nonfiction book about poker was really fun and great. Colson Whitehead Read Quote
Growing up as a product of the black civil-rights movement, I had a lot of different models for black weirdness, whether it’s Richard Pryor or James Baldwin or Jimmy Walker. Colson Whitehead Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Being a slave meant never having the stability of knowing your family would be together as many years as God designed it to be. It meant you could come back from picking cotton in a field to find that your children are gone, your husband’s gone, your mother’s gone. Colson Whitehead Read Quote
