Teju Cole

It is dangerous to live in a secure world.

— Teju Cole

“A wick, nameless, snuffed.”

— Teju Cole

“I look at his hands. In those hands is new knowledge.”

— Teju Cole

I schooled in the Boston area.

— Teju Cole

“We owe ourselves our lives.”

— Teju Cole

Life's too short for anxious score-keeping

— Teju Cole

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

— Teju Cole

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

— Teju Cole

“This is what it is to be a stranger: when you leave, there is no void.”

— Teju Cole

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

— Teju Cole

Swear you'd rather die than use 'literally' as an intensifier.

— Teju Cole

“There is a disconnect between the wealth of stories available here and the rarity of creative refuge.”

— Teju Cole

One of the chief characteristics of a mob is its quickness. It is sudden. It pounces.

— Teju Cole

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

— Teju Cole

“You must have been determined, I said. Well, no, no, you don't think of it like that, she said, you just find…

— Teju Cole

To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and…

— Teju Cole

I am suspicious of writers who say their work is original and influenced by nobody. If it is, it is probably uninteresting.…

— Teju Cole

“They are emerging, these creatives, in spite of everything; and they are essential because they are the signs of hope in a…

— Teju Cole

It takes a few years to understand what we've lived through. At the moment, we're still sort of mired in the irrelevant…

— Teju Cole

“In the shadow of skyscrapers, half-nude men in dugouts cast nets into the lagoon. The work of arms and shoulders. I think…

— Teju Cole

Echo is very important to me. I love the repetition of motifs, or the slight alteration of what's been said before. This…

— Teju Cole

I suddenly feel a vague pity for all those writers who have to ply their trade from sleepy American suburbs, writing divorce…

— Teju Cole

My own literary interest is more about excavating the past, or sensing the past inside the present. This requires all kinds of…

— Teju Cole

On many days my primary artistic struggle is, in fact, photography because it is harder to do good work with that. I…

— Teju Cole

If you see a theme that you might want to take a photo of, you sort of stand there for an hour…

— Teju Cole

I'm not trying to be a poet on Twitter; I'm trying to be aware of the fact that a very simple sentence,…

— Teju Cole

Barack Obama is an elegant and literate man with a cosmopolitan sense of the world. He is widely read in philosophy, literature,…

— Teju Cole

Because I'm an art historian, I have some experience of writing that comes out of close attention. That's what really art history…

— Teju Cole

The strange thing, though, is that most people who write novels these days seem to be aware of only a fraction of…

— Teju Cole

It is a work of psychogeography, albeit in a less explicit sense than Iain Sinclair's or Will Self's. It had to be…

— Teju Cole

I'm grateful for the likes of Kundera, Murnane, Markson, Berger, and, in his recent work, Coetzee. But no matter how celebrated they…

— Teju Cole

“From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex.…

— Teju Cole

“One goes to the market to participate in the world. As with all things that concern the world, being in the market…

— Teju Cole

“The informal economy is the livelihood of many Lagosians. But corruption, in the form of piracy or of graft, also means that…

— Teju Cole

“The mind roams more widely in the dark than it does in light. It is no surprise, then, stepping out of the…

— Teju Cole

“Money, dished out in quantities fitting the context, is a social lubricant here. It eases passage even as it maintains hierarchies. Fifty…

— Teju Cole

“As I contemplated the silent world before me, I thought of the many romantic ideas attached to blindness. Ideas of unusual sensitivity…

— Teju Cole

“He, too, was in the grip of rage and rhetoric. I saw that, attractive though his side of the political spectrum was.…

— Teju Cole

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

— Teju Cole

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

— Teju Cole