Quotes About Colson Whitehead

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

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.

The readership for 'Sag Harbor' was different from people who'd read me before - it was linear and realistic, not as strange as 'The Intuitionist.' Did they carry over to 'Zone One,' a story about zombies in New York? Some, some not. I'm used to people not caring about my other books.

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.

'Zone One' comes out of me trying to work through some of my ideas about why, for me personally, zombies are scary.

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

Perhaps Nickel was the very afterlife that awaited him, with a White House down the hill and an eternity of oatmeal and an infinite brotherhood of broken boys.

Alma used the word settled the way less genteel people used motherfucker, as a chisel to pry open a particular feeling.

You are a soulless monster whose fright mask is incapable of capturing human expressions.

The championship would be their sole acquaintance with justice at Nickel.

In his life, Donald wrapped himself in a kind of quiet that, depending on the observer, signaled imbecility or a reservoir of mystery.

South Carolina has a much more enlightened attitude toward colored advancement than the rest of the south.

In her Georgia misery she had pictured freedom, and it had not looked like this. Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare. Mingo

Roger Tipple did not have a weak chin so much as a very aggressive neck.

Rumors have flourished in worse soil than this.

each opportunity for escape was undermined by his certainty that things were about to go back to normal, that this savage new reality could not hold.

never had an inevitability been so politely proposed

Blake's face distorted in surprise and worry, that of a man stumbling into a kingdom of hornets.

There was pain and then there was pain. Different magnitudes you could stand or not stand. Wetting your beak and wetting your beak.

Alma used the word settled the way the less genteel used motherfucker, as a chisel to pry open a particular feeling.

Humiliation was his currency, but tonight Miss Laura had picked his pocket.

Lesson: If you're going to view blinds as taxes, be a Republican about them.

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'.