Colson Whitehead

I'm someone who just likes being in my cave and thinking up weird stuff.

— Colson Whitehead

“IF THEY THINK those two words New York will fix them, who are we to say otherwise.”

— Colson Whitehead

“There were plenty of things in the world that deserved to stay dead, yet they walked.”

— Colson Whitehead

I'm of that subset of native New Yorkers who can't drive.

— Colson Whitehead

I'm not a teacher; I'm not a historian. I'm trying to create a world for my characters.

— Colson Whitehead

“Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare. Mingo”

— Colson Whitehead

“He told himself: Hope is a gateway drug, don't do it.”

— Colson Whitehead

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

— Colson Whitehead

Zombies are a great rhetorical prop to talk about people and paranoia, and they are a good vehicle for my misanthropy.

— Colson Whitehead

I wanted to be one of these multidisciplinary critics who is doing music one day, TV the next, and books the next.

— Colson Whitehead

“That was the man's real trouble, not the savage and uncanny civilizations he encountered--he kept forgetting what he had.”

— Colson Whitehead

For me, the terror of the zombie is that at any moment, your friend, your family, you neighbor, your teacher, the guy…

— Colson Whitehead

“How to undo slavery's injury to the mental faculties–so many freed men continued to be enslaved by the horrors they'd endured.”

— Colson Whitehead

The terror of figuring out a new genre, of telling a new story, is what makes the job exciting, keeps me from…

— Colson Whitehead

There are good writers and bad writers. It's hard to find writers who really speak to you, but the work is out…

— Colson Whitehead

The contemporary casino is more than a gambling destination: it is a multifarious pleasure enclosure intended to satisfy every member of the…

— Colson Whitehead

“Two people, two hands, and two songs, in this case "Big Shot" and "Bette Davis Eyes." The lyrics of the two songs…

— Colson Whitehead

“The iron horse still rumbled through the tunnel when she woke. Lumbly's words returned to her: "If you want to see what…

— Colson Whitehead

I think you're only post-racial when you stop asking if you're post-racial. When the Neanderthals finally stopped asking themselves if they were…

— Colson Whitehead

Part of any book is establishing the rules at the end of the world. My first book, 'The Intuitionist,' takes place in…

— 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…

— Colson Whitehead

I write the books that I'm compelled to and I definitely learn things about the world when I write them, and I…

— Colson Whitehead

To put off the inevitable, we try to fix the city in place, remember it as it was, doing to the city…

— Colson Whitehead

“She was a stray after all. A stray not only in its plantation meaning-orphaned, with no one to look after her-but in…

— Colson Whitehead

Google "brooklyn writer" and you'll get, Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it?

— Colson Whitehead

Part of being in New York is being able to brag about what used to be there.

— Colson Whitehead

“High-minded idiocy pitted against the power of coin.”

— Colson Whitehead

If you go to a big publishing house, editorial aside, it's completely white.

— Colson Whitehead

“the full moon, the white beacon that so often agitated the slave with a mind to run.”

— Colson Whitehead

New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.

— Colson Whitehead

I envied kids who played soccer and football, but that was not my gig.

— Colson Whitehead

Monsters are a storytelling tool, like domestic realism and close third.

— Colson Whitehead

Each book requires a different kind of treatment and structural gambit.

— Colson Whitehead

I'm not a representative of blackness, and I'm not a healer.

— Colson Whitehead

Usually, when I write a novel, it takes me about 100 pages to figure out the voice of the narrator.

— Colson Whitehead

“When black blood was money, the savvy businessman knew to open the vein.”

— Colson Whitehead

We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.

— Colson Whitehead

I've always thought the Nat Turner story to be very interesting.

— Colson Whitehead

“The Great War had always been between the white and the black. It always would be.”

— Colson Whitehead

“But it's like riding a bike. A hell-bike, made out of hell.”

— Colson Whitehead