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" A lot of my books have started with an abstract premise. "

Colson Whitehead

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

Colson Whitehead

" People don't like it when you compare the miracle of childbirth to writing a book, but I think there is some overlap in the two because they are both pure agony. "

Colson Whitehead

" I didn't know I was a zombie pedant until I started considering what from the zombie canon to keep in 'Zone One' and what to ignore. "

Colson Whitehead

" I was always into comic books and horror stories and a huge consumer of pop culture. And then I worked for awhile for 'The Village Voice'. "

Colson Whitehead

" 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

" I try to have each book be an antidote to the one before. "

Colson Whitehead

" 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

" Access to information, to music or any kind of culture, is getting faster and faster and more streamlined. At each juncture, people are thrown into tumult and have to adapt or die. "

Colson Whitehead

" Stephen King in general, as well as films of the apocalypse from the '70s, had a big influence on 'Zone One.' "

Colson Whitehead

" If you want to understand America, it's slavery. "

Colson Whitehead

" I always try to mix it up with each book - changing tone, changing style keeps the work very vital for me. "

Colson Whitehead

" The Declaration of Independence is that sacred American text so full of meaning and purpose and yet quite empty if you examine it and pull it apart because the words 'All Men' exclude a vast number of citizens. "

Colson Whitehead

" I do write about race a lot, but I don't think writers - of any shade or background or whatever - have to write about certain subjects. "

Colson Whitehead

" If the world's nations can set aside their petty bickering over religion, politics, and territory, certainly I can 'get that Olympic Spirit' and rise above my prejudices. "

Colson Whitehead

" There's not a lot of good TV. "

Colson Whitehead

" As always, a lot of bad books will be published. Some good books will be published, and you have to seek them out. "

Colson Whitehead

" The movie 'Rock 'n' Roll High School' was a sacred text in my household. "

Colson Whitehead

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

Colson Whitehead

" 'Zone One' comes out of me trying to work through some of my ideas about why, for me personally, zombies are scary. "

Colson Whitehead

" 'John Henry Days' was already half in the can before my first book came out, so I'd already started something that was big and sprawling - I just had to finish it. "

Colson Whitehead

" In the apocalypse, I think those average, mediocre folks are the ones who are going to live. "

Colson Whitehead

" In college, I wrote maybe three short stories. "

Colson Whitehead

" Having a wife and kids drove home the brutal reality of the slave system for me - the price it exacted on families. On the other hand, whenever I despair over our history, I am brought back to hope, the hope that things will get better, for my children. "

Colson Whitehead

" I wrote a book of essays about New York called 'The Colossus of New York,' but it's not about - you know, when I'm writing about rush hour or Central Park, it's not a black Central Park, it's just Central Park, and it's not a black rush hour, it's just rush hour. "

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

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

Colson Whitehead

" 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

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

Colson Whitehead