I want to keep growing as a writer. I find myself doing unexpected projects and sort of challenging my idea of where I am in my career, or what I'm supposed to be doing. In fact, I'm not supposed to be doing anything. Just finding projects that are challenging to me. I want to be a writer who keeps growing and figuring out new things and hopefully people will follow me along as I publish these things.
Colson WhiteheadI 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.
Colson WhiteheadI'm trying to keep it fresh for me. I'm just trying to not bore myself. And if I can do a detective novel, and if I can do a horror novel, then why do it again? To keep the work challenging I have to keep moving.
Colson WhiteheadThe thing I love about New York is getting lost but not worrying, just wandering and wandering, knowing that there's always a subway only ten blocks away in any direction. There's always a new neighborhood to discover, a new place to lose your bearings in, and yet however alien it seems you can escape. You can always get a cab. All of life's problems can be solved by hailing a cab.
Colson WhiteheadIn 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.
Colson WhiteheadWhen I was a kid, I'd go to the African-American section in the bookstore, and I'd try and find African-American people I hadn't read before. So in that sense the category was useful to me. But it's not useful to me as I write. I don't sit down to write an African-American zombie story or an African-American story about elevators. I'm writing a story about elevators which happens to talk about race in different ways. Or I'm writing a zombie novel which doesn't have that much to do with being black in America. That novel is really about survival.
Colson Whitehead