Teju Cole Quotes

I deeply respect American sentimentality, the way one respects a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly.

Writing as writing. Writing as rioting. Writing as righting. On the best days, all three.

The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.

The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening.

To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone.

I just realized that we're facing here is an empathy gap. And this was just another way to generate conversation about something that nobody wanted to look at.

Things don't go away just because you choose to forget them.

The energies of Lagos life- creative, malevolent, ambiguous- converge at the bus stops

The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten.

I'm not trying to be in your face and take a picture that is like a journalistic kind of image. I got interested in a kind of complicated, compiled, visual field.

Love perhaps includes the promise that when the mob comes for you I'll go against the mob.

A MOB is not, as is so often said, mindless. A MOB is single-minded.

I couldn't remember what life was like before I started walking.

It is dangerous to live in a secure world.

I suddenly feel a vague pity for all those writers who have to ply their trade from sleepy American suburbs, writing divorce scenes symbolized by the very slow washing of dishes.

I adore imaginary monsters, but I am terrified of real ones.

Life's too short for anxious score-keeping

It wasn't a deception: all lovers live on partial knowledge.

Being Nigerian is a strong part of my identity. Being American is a strong part of my identity. And there are important parts of who I am that really have nothing to do with my national connection.

So, for a book set in 2006, Open City evades certain markers, while it embraces certain others. Julius doesn't use a smartphone, and he doesn't discuss contemporary US politics in any fine detail.

Always say no pun intended to draw attention to the intended pun.

Not explicitly, no. Compared to this enormous, relentless evolutionary activity in the built environment, writing is small potatoes.

It takes a few years to understand what we've lived through. At the moment, we're still sort of mired in the irrelevant bullshit. There isn't yet that public conversation about 9/11.

The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.

I schooled in the Boston area.

Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not villains of our own stories.

For purposes of marketing, writers are designated as poets, novelists, or something else. But writing is about matchmaking, an attempt to marry sensations with apt words.

The creative part of oneself finds its way out. In this case, I got interested particularly in the medium of Twitter and looked for ways to use it creatively.

The novelist can't successfully depict such horrifying reality. But she can, and must, try, to bear witness. There are many ways of doing this; the mode I prefer is indirect.

I often say I've spent more time with photography than I have with literature just in terms of hours.

One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent.

There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner.

I am a novelist, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.

...originality is little morethan the fine blending of influences.

There was no starting point for the rebellion, but I could mark an arbitrary one: that a grown-up was someone who, first and foremost, could drink a Coke at whim.

As he drank more and more, he became inebriated, and began to fashion damaged human beings.