Colson Whitehead famous quotes

A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.
-- Colson Whitehead

#Monsters #Pretending #Persons

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

#Real #Moving #Gun

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

#Perfect #Incentives #Evolution

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

#Real

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

#Kids #Writing #Class

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

#People #Monsters

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

#Self #Meals #Blanket

His legs remembered the correct position for squatting down with toys. He played. He fit the round male studs into the round female grooves. He got some thinking done as he hunkered down on his fallen-sleep legs.
-- Colson Whitehead

#Sleep #Thinking #Males

I'd never been much of an athlete, due to a physical condition I'd had since birth (unathleticism). Perhaps if there were a sport centered around lying on your couch in a neurotic stupor all day, I'd take an interest.
-- Colson Whitehead

#Sports #Lying #Athlete

The city knows you better than any living person because it has seen you when you are alone,
-- Colson Whitehead

#Cities #Persons

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

#Art #Hipster #Emotional

What does the perfect elevator look like, the one that will deliver us from the cities we suffer now, these stunted shacks? We don't know because we can't see inside it, it's something we cannot imagine, like the shape of angels' teeth. It's a black box.
-- Colson Whitehead

#Angel #Cities #Perfect

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

#Payback #Fiction #Wronged

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

#Memories #Details #Awful

What isn't said is as important as what is said.
-- Colson Whitehead

#Important #Said

Early on my career, I figured out that I just have to write the book I have to write at that moment. Whatever else is going on in the culture is just not that important. If you could get the culture to write your book, that would be great. But the culture can't write your book.
-- Colson Whitehead

#Book #Writing #Careers

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.
-- Colson Whitehead

#Growing Up #Book #Writing

I get invited to do panels with other Brooklyn writers to discuss what it's like to be a writer in Brooklyn. I expect it's like writing in Manhattan, but there aren't as many tourists walking very slowly in front of you when you step out for coffee. It's like writing in Paris, but there are fewer people speaking French.
-- Colson Whitehead

#Coffee #Writing #Paris

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

#New York #Self #Cities

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

#Hilarious #Mean #Google

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

#Pain #Sadness #Drug

A society manufactures the heroes it requires.
-- Colson Whitehead

#Hero

Isn't it great when you're a kid and the world is full of anonymous things? Everything is bright and mysterious until you know what it is called and then all the light goes out of it...Once we knew the name of it, how could we ever come to love it?...For things had true natures, and they hid behind false names, beneath the skin we gave them.
-- Colson Whitehead

#Kids #Light #Names

Best to let the broken glass be broken glass, let it splinter into smaller pieces and dust and scatter. Let the cracks between things widen until they are no longer cracks but the new places for things. That was where they were now. The world wasn't ending: it had ended and now they were in the new place. They could not recognize it because they had never seen it before.
-- Colson Whitehead

#Glasses #Dust #Broken

Colored, Negro, Afro-American, African American. ... Every couple of years someone came up with something that got us an inch closer to the truth. Bit by bit we crept along. As if that thing we believed to be approaching actually existed.
-- Colson Whitehead

#Couple #Years #African American

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

#New York #Cities #Example

In keeping with my family's affection for doomed product lines and hexed formats, we purchased a Betamax. The year before, we'd bought a TRS-80 instead of an Apple II, and in due course we'd unbox Mattel's Intellivision, instead of Atari's legendary gizmo. This was good training for a writer, for the sooner you accept the fact that you are a deluded idiot who is always out of step with reality the better off you will be.
-- Colson Whitehead

#Reality #Years #Apples

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.
-- Colson Whitehead

#Couple #Firsts #Belief

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.
-- Colson Whitehead

#Running #Men #Redemption

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.
-- Colson Whitehead

#Children #Technology #Clouds

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

#New York #Talking #World

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.
-- Colson Whitehead

#New York #Cities #Self

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 only time "early bloomer" has ever been applied to me is vis-a-vis my premature apprehension of the deep dread-of-existence thing. In all other cases, I plod and tromp along. My knuckles? Well dragged.
-- Colson Whitehead

#Knuckles #Cases #Existence