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

Colson Whitehead

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

Colson Whitehead

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

Colson Whitehead

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

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

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

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" 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

" Part of any book is establishing the rules at the end of the world. My first book, 'The Intuitionist,' takes place in an alternative world where elevator inspectors are important, so you have to establish rules, and part of that is, How do people talk? How do they behave? "

Colson Whitehead

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

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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

" 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

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

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

" Write what you know. "

Colson Whitehead

" I don't generally follow sports. At an early age, I discovered that nature had apportioned me only a small reserve of enthusiasm. Best to ration. "

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

" 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. "

Colson Whitehead

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

Colson Whitehead

" I was allowed to write about race using an elevator metaphor because of Toni Morrison and David Bradley and Ralph Ellison. Hopefully, me being weird allows someone who's 16 and wanting to write inspires them to have their own weird take on the world, and they can see the different kinds of African American voices being published. "

Colson Whitehead

" I take inspiration from books, movies, television, music - it all goes in the hopper. Depending on the project, I'm drawing from this or that piece of art that has stayed with me. Toni Morrison, George Romero, Sonic Youth - they are all in there. "

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

" 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

" You can raze the old buildings and erect magnificent corporate towers, hose down Port Authority, but you can't change people. "

Colson Whitehead

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

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

Colson Whitehead

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

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

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

Colson Whitehead

" Growing up as a product of the black civil-rights movement, I had a lot of different models for black weirdness, whether it's Richard Pryor or James Baldwin or Jimmy Walker. "

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