Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Stephen King in general, as well as films of the apocalypse from the '70s, had a big influence on 'Zone One.'
I'm raising kids, and so much of American culture sustains me and gives me things to think about and work on.
It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.
The fallout from slavery is ongoing. I am not sure the issue of race in America will ever be completely solved.
A lot of early Misfits song titles are inspired by old B-movies, which were my Popeye's spinach when I was a kid.
If you write about race in 1850, you end up talking about race today because in many ways, so little has changed.
As always, a lot of bad books will be published. Some good books will be published, and you have to seek them out.
I wanted to be one of these multidisciplinary critics who is doing music one day, TV the next, and books the next.
'Zone One' comes out of me trying to work through some of my ideas about why, for me personally, zombies are scary.
As I get older and write more books I'm definitely allowing the humorous side of my personality more rein in my work.
Zombies are a great rhetorical prop to talk about people and paranoia, and they are a good vehicle for my misanthropy.
I think each book has its own way of accommodating my concerns, whether it's about race, America, technology, the city.
If 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.
You can raze the old buildings and erect magnificent corporate towers, hose down Port Authority, but you can't change people.
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.
There will be no redemption because the men who run this place do not want redemption. They want to be as near to hell as they can.
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.
It's always hard to write and get your words out there, to find an editor, a publisher - readers! - who are going to appreciate them.
I never actually went anywhere when I was a journalist. I was a critic, and I just sort of got stuff in the mail and chatted about it.
I do write about race a lot, but I don't think writers - of any shade or background or whatever - have to write about certain subjects.
I'm an African-American writer, I'm a lazy writer, I'm a writer who likes to watch The Wire, I'm a writer who likes to eat a lot of steak.
I was always into comic books and horror stories and a huge consumer of pop culture. And then I worked for awhile for 'The Village Voice'.
I usually have two or three ideas floating around. When I have free time, the one I end up thinking most about is the one I end up pursuing.
Memory is the most malicious cutter of all, preserving, recasting, panning in slow motion across the awful bits so that we retain every detail.
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.
Slavery was a violent, brutal, immoral system, and in accurately depicting how it worked, you have to include that, obviously. Or else you are lying.
The contemporary casino is more than a gambling destination: it is a multifarious pleasure enclosure intended to satisfy every member of the family unit.
If self-absorption, vague yearnings, and a nagging sense of incompleteness are sins, then surely I will burn for all eternity, and I will save you a seat.
The idea of sacrifice is integral to the John Henry myth. Heroic figures have to die in order for us to have our stories; we live and stand on their bones.
People don't like it when you compare the miracle of childbirth to writing a book, but I think there is some overlap in the two because they are both pure agony.
It had been a humdrum couple of days, reaffirming his belief in reincarnation: everything was so boring that this could not be the first time he'd experienced it.
'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.
If the world's nations can set aside their petty bickering over religion, politics, and territory, certainly I can 'get that Olympic Spirit' and rise above my prejudices.
Growing up as a product of the black civil-rights movement, I had a lot of different models for black weirdness, whether it's Richard Pryor or James Baldwin or Jimmy Walker.
I like to explore different ideas of race, how the concept of race has evolved in the country. It's one thing I enjoy talking about, but I don't feel compelled to talk about it.
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 write books and either people read them or they don't read them. The rise of Facebook or e-books doesn't change the difficulty level of writing sentences and thinking up new ideas.
I started writing in the '90s, so I was free to just have an eccentric career and not conform to some idea of what a black writer has to do. I didn't have the burden of representation.
I live in Brooklyn. I moved here 14 years ago for the cheap rent. It was a little embarrassing because I was raised in Manhattan, and so I was a bit of a snob about the other boroughs.
Growing up devouring horror comics and novels, and being inspired to become a writer because of horror novels, movies, and comic books, I always knew I was going to write a horror novel.
I enjoy thinking about how race plays out over the centuries, how technology evolves, how cities transform themselves. These subjects are present in some of my books and absent in others.
Other people have hang-ups about what's literary or genre or whatever, and that's sort of not my problem. You're supposed to write what you have to write, and you're supposed to keep moving.
My mom's mother was from Virginia, but I don't feel much of a tie. I'm very much anti-South for many, many reasons. Whenever I go down there, people are always looking at me funny, you know.
In America, when you hear about the Underground Railroad, it's so evocative. You think it's a literal subway for a few minutes before your teacher goes on and describes where it actually was.
Some people don't like my fiction, because they prefer the nonfiction. But moving around keeps the work fresh for me and, hopefully, for my one or two readers who follow me from book to book!
I grew up reading the 'Village Voice' and wanting to be one of these multidisciplinary music writers, film writers, book writers. And I lucked out getting a job at the 'Voice' right after college.
I love getting out of the Q train at Union Square. It's such a mix of people, like a party. There's always an errand you can do along there, whether it's picking up contacts or buying poker chips.
In fifth grade, we did 10 minutes on slavery and 40 minutes on Abraham Lincoln, and in 10th grade you might do 10 minutes on the civil rights era and 40 minutes on Martin Luther King, and that's it.
The terror of figuring out a new genre, of telling a new story, is what makes the job exciting, keeps me from getting bored, and I assume it keeps whoever follows my work from getting bored as well.
When I'm working on a book, I try to do eight pages a week. That seems like a good amount. Less than that, I'm not getting a nice momentum, and more than that, I'm probably putting out too much crap.