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" I like to know how I'm supposed to feel about things. Just a little clue or hint. "

Colson Whitehead

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" I think a joke is a form of truth-telling. A good joke that's absurd contains elements of our daily darkness and also a possibility to escape that darkness. So, for me, humor is an attempt to capture everyday tragedy and everyday hopeful moments that we experience all of the time. "

Colson Whitehead

" I am not sure the issue of race in America will ever be completely solved. "

Colson Whitehead

" I was 7 years old when 'Roots' was first broadcast, and my parents gathered all us kids around the TV to learn about how we got here. But it wasn't until I sat down and immersed myself in the research that I got the barest inkling of what it meant to be a slave. "

Colson Whitehead

" 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

" When I'm working on a book, I try to do eight pages a week. That seems like a good amount. Less than that, I'm not getting a nice momentum, and more than that, I'm probably putting out too much crap. "

Colson Whitehead

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

Colson Whitehead

" 'Zone One' has one kind of an apocalypse, and 'The Underground Railroad' another. In both cases, the narrators are animated by a hope in a better place of refuge - in the last surviving human outpost, Up North. Does it exist? They can only believe. "

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

" I try to keep each different book different from the last. So 'Sag Harbor' is very different from 'Apex Hides the Hurt;' 'The Intuitionist,' which is kind of a detective novel, is very different from 'John Henry Days.' I'm just trying to keep things rich for me creatively and for the readers who follow me. "

Colson Whitehead

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

Colson Whitehead

" Some people don't like my fiction, because they prefer the nonfiction. But moving around keeps the work fresh for me and, hopefully, for my one or two readers who follow me from book to book! "

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

" For me, choosing between fiction and nonfiction is really only about picking the right tool for the job. "

Colson Whitehead

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

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

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

Colson Whitehead

" For me, the terror of the zombie is that at any moment, your friend, your family, you neighbor, your teacher, the guy at the bodega down the street, can be revealed as the monster they've always been. "

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

" The terror of figuring out a new genre, of telling a new story, is what makes the job exciting, keeps me from getting bored, and I assume it keeps whoever follows my work from getting bored as well. "

Colson Whitehead

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

Colson Whitehead

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

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

" If you write about race in 1850, you end up talking about race today because in many ways, so little has changed. "

Colson Whitehead

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

Colson Whitehead

" My mom's mother was from Virginia, but I don't feel much of a tie. I'm very much anti-South for many, many reasons. Whenever I go down there, people are always looking at me funny, you know. "

Colson Whitehead

" In fifth grade, we did 10 minutes on slavery and 40 minutes on Abraham Lincoln, and in 10th grade you might do 10 minutes on the civil rights era and 40 minutes on Martin Luther King, and that's it. "

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. "

Colson Whitehead

" I was inspired to become a writer by horror movies and science fiction. "

Colson Whitehead

" In America, when you hear about the Underground Railroad, it's so evocative. You think it's a literal subway for a few minutes before your teacher goes on and describes where it actually was. "

Colson Whitehead

" I love getting out of the Q train at Union Square. It's such a mix of people, like a party. There's always an errand you can do along there, whether it's picking up contacts or buying poker chips. "

Colson Whitehead