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

Colson Whitehead

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" I write at home. I like to be able to take a nap, watch TV, make a sandwich, and if I wake up and don't feel like working, I'm not going to bang my head on my desk all day: I'll go out and do something else. "

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" There's always an attack on the sophomore novel from some quarters. "

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" I grew up reading the 'Village Voice' and wanting to be one of these multidisciplinary music writers, film writers, book writers. And I lucked out getting a job at the 'Voice' right after college. "

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" What isn't said is as important as what is said. "

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

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

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" 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. "

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

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

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" 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. "

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

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

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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

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" I use New York to talk about home, but the ideas in 'Colossus' could be transferred to other cities. The story about Central Park is really about the first day of spring in any park. The Coney Island chapter is really about beaches and summer and heat waves. "

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" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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" 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

" I like questions that tee me up to make weird jokes, frankly. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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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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" 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. "

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" Write what you know. "

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

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