Colson Whitehead Quotes

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

I've loved sci-fi and speculative fiction since I was a kid. It was inevitable I'd try my hand at it at some point.

In any genre you're working in, you can always find a way to tell a particular kind of story. I love fantasy; I love science fiction. I love all kinds of fiction, in fact.

Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.

When I was in my late twenties, a friend suggested that, since I was an avid SF reader and had been since I was barely a teenager, that since it didn't look like the poetry was going where I wanted, I might try writing a science fiction story. I did, and the first story I ever wrote was 'The Great American Economy.'

If you're writing a detective novel or horror or sci-fi, you want to expand or reinvigorate the genre in your own little way.

I write speculative fiction, and in my view, speculative fiction is really just a very intense version of the work of literature in general.

I have 20 or 30 books completely plotted out in my mind - mysteries, thrillers, horror, romance, science fiction. You name it.

In older science fiction stories, they had to rely on storytelling as opposed to spectacle. The old run of the 'Twilight Zone,' the star was the writing and the storytelling, and the characters and the twists and the cleverness in the setup and payoff and execution.

I would like to write a book that wasn't so violent and weird, but I just don't think I can do that with my talent. I don't think it would come off.

A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.

I am never not thinking about stories. 'The Bone Season' is 90% of my brain - 10% is interacting with the rest of the world.

Ultimately, in my mind, that's what I'm trying to do with my fiction; I'm trying to transport my reader into a different world.

I would be more frightened as a writer if people thought my movies were like science fiction.

While I was in high school, I discovered and began writing science fiction.

It's the imagination that is involved in sci-fi, and fantasy is what draws me to it. Stories, everything.

My stories include realistic fiction and fantasy.

I really strived to give equal weight to the two halves of my genre's name: science and fiction.

Fiction, even when it's grim and hard, is fun.

I went through a big Kurt Vonnegut phase. But the writers who made me decide at a very early age that this is probably something I wanted to do were Stephen King and Douglas Adams, when I was probably, like, ten years old.

In a sense, fantasy is a freer play of the imagination. You can achieve exactly the situation you want with less groundwork, less of a need to fill in all of the background. For science fiction, I would use a lot of sources to set up, for instance, what a being from another planet would be like.

I wanted to learn about the worlds I wanted to write about in fiction.

The book that first made me want to be a writer is Flannery O'Connor's short story collection 'A Good Man Is Hard To Find.'

I think that fiction has a certain power.

Sci-fi and horror, particularly, allow a storyteller to depart from, let's say, the demands of cinema verite or kitchen-sink realism or, even, just relatable dramas and can go into areas that are either - in the case of horror - more primally effective or, in the case of sci-fi, more speculative or imaginative.