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" I admire Vegas's purity, its entirely wholesome artificiality. "

Colson Whitehead

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" 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

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

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" 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. "

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" I've always had a love of cards, ever since I was a little kid. I think poker, as a system, describes the chaos of the world. Our sudden reversals, our freak streaks of fortune. The belief that the next hand can save you, and the inevitable failure of the next hand to save you. I think that describes my world view pretty well. "

Colson Whitehead

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

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

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

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" I'm just trying to keep things rich for me creatively and for the readers who follow me. "

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" If you're writing a detective novel or horror or sci-fi, you want to expand or reinvigorate the genre in your own little way. "

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" 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

" Once I got to college, it seemed that the Hamptons were a little bit too posh for me and didn't represent the kind of values I was embracing in my late teens. So, I didn't go out there, except to visit my parents, for a long time. And then, after 9/11, I discovered it was a nice, mellow place to hang out. "

Colson Whitehead

" I live in Brooklyn. I moved here 14 years ago for the cheap rent. It was a little embarrassing because I was raised in Manhattan, and so I was a bit of a snob about the other boroughs. "

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" 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. "

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

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" You can't rush inspiration. "

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

Colson Whitehead

" A lot of early Misfits song titles are inspired by old B-movies, which were my Popeye's spinach when I was a kid. "

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" I never actually went anywhere when I was a journalist. I was a critic, and I just sort of got stuff in the mail and chatted about it. "

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

Colson Whitehead

" In 'John Henry Days,' I was taking my idea of junketeering and sort of blowing it up to absurd extremes. "

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

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

Colson Whitehead

" Other people have hang-ups about what's literary or genre or whatever, and that's sort of not my problem. You're supposed to write what you have to write, and you're supposed to keep moving. "

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

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

Colson Whitehead

" Most of my books have always worked through juxtaposition, jumping through different point of views and time. "

Colson Whitehead

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

Colson Whitehead

" The idea of sacrifice is integral to the John Henry myth. Heroic figures have to die in order for us to have our stories; we live and stand on their bones. "

Colson Whitehead

" Slavery was a violent, brutal, immoral system, and in accurately depicting how it worked, you have to include that, obviously. Or else you are lying. "

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" 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