A biography for Colson Whiteheadhasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“I wrote a book of essays about New York called 'The Colossus of New York,' but it's not about - you know, when I'm writing about rush hour or Central Park, it's not a black Central Park, it's just Central Park, and it's not a black rush hour, it's just rush hour.”
“I've always had a love of cards, ever since I was a little kid. I think poker, as a system, describes the chaos of the world. Our sudden reversals, our freak streaks of fortune. The belief that the next hand can save you, and the inevitable failure of the next hand to save you. I think that describes my world view pretty well.”
“Write what you know.”
“'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.”
“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.”
“There's not a lot of good TV.”
“'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.”
“Cora had heard Michael recite the Declaration of Independence back on the Randall plantation many times, his voice drifting through the village like an angry phantom. She didn't understand the words, most of them at any rate, but 'created equal' was not lost on her. The white men who wrote it didn't understand it either, if 'all men' did not truly mean all men.”