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

Colson Whitehead

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

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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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" I'm raising kids, and so much of American culture sustains me and gives me things to think about and work on. "

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" Schools don't teach American history that well, especially a lot of black American history. "

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

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" I usually have two or three ideas floating around. When I have free time, the one I end up thinking most about is the one I end up pursuing. "

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" Write what you know. "

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

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

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

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" I'm always trying to switch voices and genres. "

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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. "

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

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

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" 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. "

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

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" 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. "

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

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" It's always hard to write and get your words out there, to find an editor, a publisher - readers! - who are going to appreciate them. "

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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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" 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. "

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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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" 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. "

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" I started writing in the '90s, so I was free to just have an eccentric career and not conform to some idea of what a black writer has to do. I didn't have the burden of representation. "

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