Quotes from Colson Whitehead

Google "brooklyn writer" and you'll get, Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it?

If niggers were supposed to have their freedom, they wouldn't be in chains. If the red man was supposed to keep hold of his land, it'd still be his. If the white man wasn't destined to take this new world, he wouldn't own it now. Here was the true Great Spirit, the divine thread connecting all human endeavor--if you can keep it, it is yours. Your property, slave or continent. The American imperative.

She wasn't surprised when his character revealed itself—if you waited long enough, it always did. Like the dawn.

A plantation was a plantation; one might think one's misfortunes distinct, but the true horror lay in their universality.

Poetry and prayer put ideas in people's heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.

As time went on, we learned to arm ourselves in our different ways. Some of us with real guns, some of us with more ephemeral weapons, an idea or improbable plan or some sort of formulation about how best to move through the world. An idea that will let us be. Protect us and keep us safe. But a weapon nonetheless.

Yet when his classmates put their blades to a colored cadaver, they did more for the cause of colored advancement than the most high-minded abolitionist. In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man's equal.

Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare.

Like justice, it existed in theory.

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

I was always into comic books and horror stories and a huge consumer of pop culture. And then I worked for awhile for 'The Village Voice'.

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.

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.

It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.

Google "brooklyn writer" and you'll get, Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it?