As I get older and write more books I'm definitely allowing the humorous side of my personality more rein in my work.
Colson WhiteheadIf 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.
Colson WhiteheadBest 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 WhiteheadI can't say that you should extract this or that value from my books explicitly. They are up for interpretation. In terms of the obligation, I think we're all individuals on this planet, trying to scratch our way through the day, and if you're writing a book exposing atrocities in Rwanda or writing a murder mystery set in a mountain village, I think both ways of spending you time are valid and both books are probably fine to read.
Colson WhiteheadMemory is the most malicious cutter of all, preserving, recasting, panning in slow motion across the awful bits so that we retain every detail.
Colson WhiteheadI like movies. I've written screenplays as a sort of procrastination thing for me. Like I'll work for a couple months on this idea that's been kicking around and then like 30 pages in I'll just go try a novel because it's a lot easier. That's what I know. So why am I killing myself?
Colson Whitehead