Quotes from Colson Whitehead

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Anytime an African-American writes an unconventional novel, the writer gets compared to Ellison. But that's O.K. I am working in the African-American literary tradition. That's my aim and what I see as my mission.

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

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.

You can't rush inspiration.

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

If self-absorption, vague yearnings, and a nagging sense of incompleteness are sins, then surely I will burn for all eternity, and I will save you a seat.

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.

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.

'Driving while black' was taught to me at a young age.

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

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.

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.

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.

For years I felt that I wasn't ready to take on slavery. It's a huge topic, and I didn't want to mess it up.

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

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

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.

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.

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