Goodness Quotes
Find one of the best and famous quote catagorized into topics like inspirational, motivations, deep, thoughtful, art, success, passion, frindship, life, love and many more.
I didn't know I was a zombie pedant until I started considering what from the zombie canon to keep in 'Zone One' and what to ignore.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
In America, when you hear about the Underground Railroad, it's so evocative. You think it's a literal subway for a few minutes before your teacher goes on and describes where it actually was.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
Part of being in New York is being able to brag about what used to be there.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
I love getting out of the Q train at Union Square. It's such a mix of people, like a party. There's always an errand you can do along there, whether it's picking up contacts or buying poker chips.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
The terror of figuring out a new genre, of telling a new story, is what makes the job exciting, keeps me from getting bored, and I assume it keeps whoever follows my work from getting bored as well.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
I wanted to be one of these multidisciplinary critics who is doing music one day, TV the next, and books the next.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
Access to information, to music or any kind of culture, is getting faster and faster and more streamlined. At each juncture, people are thrown into tumult and have to adapt or die.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
In 'John Henry Days,' I was taking my idea of junketeering and sort of blowing it up to absurd extremes.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
I never actually went anywhere when I was a journalist. I was a critic, and I just sort of got stuff in the mail and chatted about it.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
As always, a lot of bad books will be published. Some good books will be published, and you have to seek them out.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
It's always hard to write and get your words out there, to find an editor, a publisher - readers! - who are going to appreciate them.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
'John Henry Days' was already half in the can before my first book came out, so I'd already started something that was big and sprawling - I just had to finish it.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
I'm raising kids, and so much of American culture sustains me and gives me things to think about and work on.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
In the apocalypse, I think those average, mediocre folks are the ones who are going to live.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
I was always into comic books and horror stories and a huge consumer of pop culture. And then I worked for awhile for 'The Village Voice'.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
Usually, when I write a novel, it takes me about 100 pages to figure out the voice of the narrator.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
If you write about race in 1850, you end up talking about race today because in many ways, so little has changed.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
There are good writers and bad writers. It's hard to find writers who really speak to you, but the work is out there.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
I enjoy thinking about how race plays out over the centuries, how technology evolves, how cities transform themselves. These subjects are present in some of my books and absent in others.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
I do write about race a lot, but I don't think writers - of any shade or background or whatever - have to write about certain subjects.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
People don't like it when you compare the miracle of childbirth to writing a book, but I think there is some overlap in the two because they are both pure agony.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
A lot of early Misfits song titles are inspired by old B-movies, which were my Popeye's spinach when I was a kid.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
The movie 'Rock 'n' Roll High School' was a sacred text in my household.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
If self-absorption, vague yearnings, and a nagging sense of incompleteness are sins, then surely I will burn for all eternity, and I will save you a seat.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
The readership for 'Sag Harbor' was different from people who'd read me before - it was linear and realistic, not as strange as 'The Intuitionist.' Did they carry over to 'Zone One,' a story about zombies in New York? Some, some not. I'm used to people not caring about my other books.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
I knew that a zombie book would not particularly appeal to some of my previous readers, but it was artistically compelling, and being able to do a short nonfiction book about poker was really fun and great.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
I started writing in the '90s, so I was free to just have an eccentric career and not conform to some idea of what a black writer has to do. I didn't have the burden of representation.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
Growing up as a product of the black civil-rights movement, I had a lot of different models for black weirdness, whether it's Richard Pryor or James Baldwin or Jimmy Walker.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
In the 1930s, the government paid writers to interview 80- and 90-year-old former slaves, and I read those accounts. I came away realizing - not surprisingly - that many slave masters were sadists who spent a lot of time thinking up creative ways of hurting people.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
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.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
I usually have two or three ideas floating around. When I have free time, the one I end up thinking most about is the one I end up pursuing.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
Once I got to college, it seemed that the Hamptons were a little bit too posh for me and didn't represent the kind of values I was embracing in my late teens. So, I didn't go out there, except to visit my parents, for a long time. And then, after 9/11, I discovered it was a nice, mellow place to hang out.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
In fifth grade, we did 10 minutes on slavery and 40 minutes on Abraham Lincoln, and in 10th grade you might do 10 minutes on the civil rights era and 40 minutes on Martin Luther King, and that's it.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
'Zone One' has one kind of an apocalypse, and 'The Underground Railroad' another. In both cases, the narrators are animated by a hope in a better place of refuge - in the last surviving human outpost, Up North. Does it exist? They can only believe.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
I was allowed to write about race using an elevator metaphor because of Toni Morrison and David Bradley and Ralph Ellison. Hopefully, me being weird allows someone who's 16 and wanting to write inspires them to have their own weird take on the world, and they can see the different kinds of African American voices being published.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
If you go to a big publishing house, editorial aside, it's completely white.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead
I try to keep each different book different from the last. So 'Sag Harbor' is very different from 'Apex Hides the Hurt;' 'The Intuitionist,' which is kind of a detective novel, is very different from 'John Henry Days.' I'm just trying to keep things rich for me creatively and for the readers who follow me.
Quote by -Colson Whitehead