412 Quotes by Colson Whitehead

Access to information, to music or any kind of culture, is getting faster and faster and more streamlined. At each juncture, people are thrown into tumult and have to adapt or die.

I do write about race a lot, but I don't think writers - of any shade or background or whatever - have to write about certain subjects.

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

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.

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.

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.

If you go to a big publishing house, editorial aside, it's completely white.

As always, a lot of bad books will be published. Some good books will be published, and you have to seek them out.

The terror of figuring out a new genre, of telling a new story, is what makes the job exciting, keeps me from getting bored, and I assume it keeps whoever follows my work from getting bored as well.