Colson Whitehead
Colson Whitehead
Colson Whitehead is a New York-based novelist. He is the author of the 1999 novel The Intuitionist, as well as four other novels and two books of non-fiction. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Fellowship...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
CountryUnited States of America
new-york self cities
New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.
hilarious mean google
Google "brooklyn writer" and you'll get, Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it?
falling-in-love inspiration calling
Don’t go searching for a subject, let your subject find you. You can’t rush inspiration. … Once your subject finds you, it’s like falling in love. It will be your constant companion. Shadowing you, peeping in your windows, calling you at all hours to leave messages like, Only you understand me.
book bored want
In terms of why everything is different, each book is different than the one before because I'm so bored of what I just finished I want to work on something different. The next book becomes an antidote to what I did before.
new-york self cities
To put off the inevitable, we try to fix the city in place, remember it as it was, doing to the city what we would never allow to be done to ourselves. . . . New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.
couple firsts belief
It had been a humdrum couple of days, reaffirming his belief in reincarnation: everything was so boring that this could not be the first time he'd experienced it.
people monsters
We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.
ideas three should
If I have three ideas and I'm working on one more than the others, that sort of tells me that I should work on that one.
memories awful slow-motion
Memory is the most malicious cutter of all, preserving, recasting, panning in slow motion across the awful bits so that we retain every detail.
writing kids class
Most people say, "Show, don't tell," but I stand by Show and Tell, because when writers put their work out into the world, they're like kids bringing their broken unicorns and chewed-up teddy bears into class in the sad hope that someone else will love them as much as they do.
real new-yorkers
You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.
jobs book writing
In terms of the economics, yes obviously the rise of e-books and how people choose to read books has a big effect on the economics of the game. But whether people are buying them on paper or downloading them there's still some poor wretch in a room who is trying to write a poem, write a story, write a novel. And so my job doesn't change. It's just how people receive it and economic conditions on the ground change, but that doesn't affect what I write.
perfect incentives evolution
It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.
real moving gun
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.