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.
Colson WhiteheadRead
I try to have each book be an antidote to the one before.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Each book serves as a remedy or contrast to the previous one.
Colson Whitehead expresses the idea that with each new book he writes, he aims to create something that counters or challenges the themes of his last work. This approach highlights the importance of diversity and growth in an artist's output, suggesting that art should evolve and reflect different facets of the human experience.
Themes
BooksWritingArtCreativityEvolution
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about literature, I highlighted Colson Whitehead’s quote to illustrate the importance of innovation in storytelling.
More from Colson Whitehead
All quotes →I don't generally follow sports. At an early age, I discovered that nature had apportioned me only a small reserve of enthusiasm. Best to ration.
Colson WhiteheadRead
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 WhiteheadRead
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.
Colson WhiteheadRead
I use New York to talk about home, but the ideas in 'Colossus' could be transferred to other cities. The story about Central Park is really about the first day of spring in any park. The Coney Island chapter is really about beaches and summer and heat waves.
Colson WhiteheadRead
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 WhiteheadRead
Similar quotes
[The artist] is like a pump; he has inside him a great pipe that reaches down into the entrails of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was lying there below, dim and unnoticed, and brings it in great jets to the sunlight.
Gustave FlaubertRead
When I grew up, what was interesting for me was that music was color and life was gray. So music for me has always been more than entertainment.
Pete TownshendRead
A successful novel should interrupt the reader’s life, make him or her miss appointments, skip meals, forget to walk the dog.
Stephen KingRead
I have been given a lot of roles that are downtrodden, mammy-ish. A lot of lawyers or doctors who have names but absolutely no lives. You're going to get your three or four scenes; you're not going to be able to show what you can do.
Viola DavisRead
When I wrote my fictional novels, they always had a starting point of something real. Those images that are not real are exactly the same strength and power of the real ones, and the line between them is completely blurred.
Karl Ove KnausgardRead
I never try to convey a message, I just want to tell a story. Why that story in particular? I have no idea, but I have learned to surrender to the muse. I become obsessed with a theme or with certain stories; they haunt me for years, and finally, I write them.
Isabel AllendeRead