These days I find myself wanting to avoid being pigeon-holed, ghettoized, held in a different category than other authors. And when people ask me if I'm a black writer, or just a writer who happens to be black, I tend to say that it's either a dumb question or a question which happens to be dumb.

Colson Whitehead

Categorized in : People Dumb Black

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

Colson Whitehead

incentives failure perfect

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.

Colson Whitehead

gun real moving

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.

Colson Whitehead

writing class kids

The fallout from slavery is ongoing. I am not sure the issue of race in America will ever be completely solved.

Colson Whitehead

slavery not-sure

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.

Colson Whitehead

falling-in-love inspiration messages

The Declaration of Independence is that sacred American text so full of meaning and purpose and yet quite empty if you examine it and pull it apart because the words "All Men" exclude a vast number of citizens.

Colson Whitehead

independence purpose men

A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.

Colson Whitehead

pretending persons monsters

I didn't have to do that much research to present a post-apocalyptic New York because I basically grew up in that New York. That old New York is gone, and that's one thing that's undiscoverable now but I explore in my fiction.

Colson Whitehead

What isn't said is as important as what is said.

Colson Whitehead

important said

Memory is the most malicious cutter of all, preserving, recasting, panning in slow motion across the awful bits so that we retain every detail.

Colson Whitehead

details awful memories

Sanctimony and self-regard are as American as smallpox blankets and supersize meals.

Colson Whitehead

blanket meals self

I'm not really up on what's new. I'm still listening to Run DMC twenty-five years later. In the same way that the baby-boomers in America were forcing '60s music and Motown down our throats, now people of my generation are forcing Tears For Fears and old Hip Hop upon others.

Colson Whitehead

hip-hop running people

You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.

Colson Whitehead

new-yorkers real

In other words, fiction is payback for those who have wronged you.

Colson Whitehead

wronged payback fiction

We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.

Colson Whitehead

monsters people

As I get older and write more books I'm definitely allowing the humorous side of my personality more rein in my work.

Colson Whitehead

humorous writing book

Being a slave meant never having the stability of knowing your family would be together as many years as God designed it to be. It meant you could come back from picking cotton in a field to find that your children are gone, your husband's gone, your mother's gone. It meant knowing you are property that could be sold to the highest bidder, of value only to continue to support the plantation economy.

Colson Whitehead

support together children

Pain could be killed. Sadness could not, but the drugs did shut its mouth for a time.

Colson Whitehead

sadness drug pain

I think the world's big enough for all kinds of zombies. You can have yours and I can have mine. I think by going with slow zombies I maybe have been asserting my own kind of zombie snobbery, but I don't begrudge the youngsters their tackling, running, jumping zombies.

Colson Whitehead

zombie running thinking

Hipsters seek refuge in church, Our Lady of Perpetual Subculture. There is some discussion as to whether or not they are still cool but then they are calmed by the obscure location and the arrival of their kind. Keep the address to yourself, let the rabble fund it themselves. Wow, this crappy performance art is really making me feel no so terrible about my various emotional issues.

Colson Whitehead

hipster emotional art