Colson Whitehead Quotes

My views about the safety of Jews in the world have not been changed by the work on the Dreyfus affair or, for that matter, by the work I did on Franz Kafka for the book on him I published a year before the Dreyfus book appeared.

The modern world is one wherein every nation has to develop the strength of which its citizens are capable. The independent status of the individual, his thoughts and actions become a thing of the past.

Making the City Of Joy gave me the best political education of my life. It became a wrestling match between an Englishman who had gradually ceased to be a Marxist, and a culture that was becoming more Marxist by the day.

We live in a world of crisis, of challenge, and... it's in our galleries that we can unpack the civilizations that we're seeing the current manifestations of.

I've also worked hard portraying an Ireland which is fast disappearing. Ireland was a very depressed and difficult place in the 1980s, and I've tried to include that in the script. I worked really hard to find the heart of the book.

When I was a student there in the mid-1990s, they had just created the weekend; depth and individuality were slowly returning after the austere, colorless low of the 1970s. When I returned to live in China from 2005 to 2013, the country was building everything anew.

Montreal is a very cosmopolitan, sophisticated, erudite, educated, glorious city today. But it wasn't quite that way when I was growing up there. There was a lot of anti-Semitism. And I had to deal with that in an area of the city that had very few Jews.

Future historians trying to determine what it was like to be alive in fin de millennium America should read the last two decades of O. Henry and Best American short-story collections.

I think some of the things I deal with Hopper probably has dealt with also, since it's somewhat the same environment and I have pretty strong reactions to what this country looks like. It looks pretty dull and spare, and you like this and dislike it and it's very complicated.

As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair.

When I read 'Dream of Red Mansions,' I was really struck by the fact that it was built differently from a lot of genre works. Specifically, a lot of the events that should have taken centre-stage - wars, social upheavals - were seen entirely through the eyes of the women of a Chinese household.

Right around the end of the fifties, college students and young people in general, began to realize that this music was almost like a history of our country - this music contained the real history of the people of this country.

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

The world is very different today than it was in 1968.

Asian literature is evolving with the people. It's always a reflection on what's happening to the culture at large.

People are becoming more and more aware of how the dominance of development and business is altering their lives and, in particular, their own heritage.

Perhaps that is why the novel flourished in England. You had these communities that would stay put and people would see one another all the time and cause one another to change and have the opportunity to observe the changes over time.

The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilization.

Modern Times. It’s a very good historical book about history.

Race, class, and gender in our heritage, in our history as people of America, have intermingled and interpenetrated in dazzling, complex, destructive, and empowering ways. Figuring these ways out constitutes a major preoccupation of the discipline of history.

I know that the Seattle my parents knew is not the Seattle I know and that these things exist in a state of constant flux and change. The hope is that at least some of that change can be for the better.

I think that James Baldwin is, for sure, one of the most important American writer/thinkers of his time... not just African-American. He singled-handedly revolutionized the political, artistic, and historical discourses about America.

Let's face it: there aren't a lot of black superheroes. So, in dealing with a black superhero, you're going to deal with ugly history and the beauty of history.

Faulkner speaks to us on the questions of race, the challenges of modernity, and modern man's dilemma in all of its aspects. That he is able to specify among those and bring those themes alive is one of his great gifts. There are so many different kinds of pleasures one gets from encountering those materials.

Yes, I've heard of the 'Mad Men' comparisons, but I like to think 'The Hour' has its own distinctive voice. Although it is set in 1956, I have tried to give it a contemporary edge, and its themes of love, passion, romance, fury, professional jealousy, and personal failure are universal, I think.