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
children technology clouds
I can't blame modern technology for my predilection for distraction, not after all the hours I've spent watching lost balloons disappear into the clouds. I did it before the Internet, and I'll do it after the apocalypse, assuming we still have helium and weak-gripped children.
new-york talking world
Talking about New York is a way of talking about the world.
book writing thinking
I write books and either people read them or they don't read them. The rise of Facebook or e-books doesn't change the difficulty level of writing sentences and thinking up new ideas.
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.