Colson Whitehead Quotes

A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A society manufactures the heroes it requires.

Google "brooklyn writer" and you'll get, Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it?

New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.

New York City in life was much like New York City in death. It was still hard to get a cab, for example.

The city knows you better than any living person because it has seen you when you are alone.

There will be no redemption because the men who run this place do not want redemption. They want to be as near to hell as they can.

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

Growing up devouring horror comics and novels, and being inspired to become a writer because of horror novels, movies, and comic books, I always knew I was going to write a horror novel.

I'm an African-American writer, I'm a lazy writer, I'm a writer who likes to watch The Wire, I'm a writer who likes to eat a lot of steak.

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.

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

I think each book has its own way of accommodating my concerns, whether it's about race, America, technology, the city.

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

For years I felt that I wasn't ready to take on slavery. It's a huge topic, and I didn't want to mess it up.

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.

Talking about New York is a way of talking about the world.

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.

Here's a tip for new parents: Start lowering those expectations early, it's going to pay off later.

Mark Spitz didn't ask about Harry. You never asked about the characters that disappeared from a Last Night story. You knew the answer. The plague had a knack for narrative closure.

Men start off good and then the world makes them mean. The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day. It uses you up until you only dream of death.

You should have gone yourself, you ask for a Coke and they come back with orange drink. No one understands the martyrdom of the volunteers for the trip to food concession.

Stolen bodies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood.

Now that she had run away and seen a bit of the country, Cora wasn't sure the document described anything real at all. America was a ghost in the darkness, like her.

Whoever has the better stuff wins. Sound familiar, American lackeys of late-stage capitalism?

That is how the European tribes operate, she said, If they can't control it, they destroy it.

Slavery is a sin when whites were put to the yoke, but not the African. All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man.

From the trunk of their scheme, choices and decisions sprouted like branches and shoots.

What a world it is, Cora thought, that makes a living prison into your only haven. Was she out of bondage or in its web: how to describe the status of a runaway?

White man trying to kill you slow every day, and sometimes trying to kill you fast. Why make it easy for him? That was one kind of work you could say no to.

A slow hour passed, distracted by intermittent drops of moisture from above, as if the sky were conducting a feasibility study on the implications of rain. Of committing to a course of action.

Racial prejudice rotted one's faculties, he said.

Cora blamed the people who wrote it down. People always got things wrong, on purpose as much as by accident.

An elevator doesn’t exist without its freight. If there’s no one to get on, the elevator remains in quiescence. The elevator and the passenger need each other.

Maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us.

see chains on another person and be glad they are not your own--such was the good fortune permitted colored people, defined by how much worse it could be at any moment.

Cherish your old apartments and pause for a moment when you pass them. Pay tribute, for they are the caretakers for your reinventions.

They don't give gold bracelets for regrets.

I'm here because I was born here and thus ruined for anywhere else, but I don't know about you.

Why should anyone else have it easy. Spoken like a true New Yorker.

Resentment was the hinge of her personality.