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 Read Quote
A lot of my writer friends live near me, and that makes people think we just hang around with one another in cafes, trading work and discussing ‘Harper’s’ and what not. But I rarely see them. We’re home working. Colson Whitehead Read Quote
The contemporary casino is more than a gambling destination: it is a multifarious pleasure enclosure intended to satisfy every member of the family unit. Colson Whitehead Read Quote
In ’82 and ’83, that was the rise of the VCR. Every Friday, my brother and I would go to Crazy Eddie’s – which was a video store in Manhattan – and rent five horror movies. And that’s basically what we did, basically, for three years. Becoming social misfits. Colson Whitehead Read Quote
In ‘John Henry Days,’ I was taking my idea of junketeering and sort of blowing it up to absurd extremes. Colson Whitehead Read Quote
Sag Harbor’ was a very different book for me. It changed the way I thought about books that I wanted to do. Colson Whitehead Read Quote
The readership for ‘Sag Harbor’ was different from people who’d read me before – it was linear and realistic, not as strange as ‘The Intuitionist.’ Did they carry over to ‘Zone One,’ a story about zombies in New York? Some, some not. I’m used to people not caring about my other books. Colson Whitehead Read Quote
