Teju Cole

Religion is close to theatre; much of its power comes from the effects of staging and framing.

— Teju Cole

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

— Teju Cole

Never say 'I went to Harvard.' Say 'I schooled in the Boston area.'

— Teju Cole

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

— Teju Cole

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

— Teju Cole

“What, I wonder, are the social consequences of life in a country that has no use for history?”

— Teju Cole

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

— Teju Cole

“It was I, no less solitary than he but having made the lesser use of the morning, who was to be pitied.”

— Teju Cole

I'm not trying to be in your face and take a picture that is like a journalistic kind of image. I got…

— Teju Cole

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

— Teju Cole

I'd like to meet fewer people who say 'Oh, I want to write a book, here are 10 pages I've written,' and…

— Teju Cole

You don't bring in a gay character as a way of commenting on gay issues. You have one there because he's real,…

— Teju Cole

I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing…

— Teju Cole

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

— Teju Cole

The novelist can't successfully depict such horrifying reality. But she can, and must, try, to bear witness. There are many ways of…

— Teju Cole

“The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten...Generations rushed through the eye of the needle, and I,…

— Teju Cole

“There are other letters, from the heirs of fictional magnates, from the widows of oil barons, from the legal representatives of incarcerated…

— Teju Cole

Killing a bunch of people in Sudan and Yemen and Pakistan, it's like, "Who cares - we don't know them." But the…

— Teju Cole

You know that this vignette and that vignette belong side by side, you know that a certain turn of phrase you've been…

— Teju Cole

“Most of the people around me yesterday were middle-aged or old. I am used to it, but it never ceases to surprise…

— Teju Cole

Each time I caught sight of geese swooping in formation across the sky, I wondered how our life below might look from…

— Teju Cole

Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a…

— Teju Cole

“My shoulders are dropped back, my face is tensed, my eyes narrowed. It is difficult to keep from overdoing it at first,…

— Teju Cole

The most common thing I find is very brilliant, acute, young people who want to become writers but they are not writing.…

— Teju Cole

“The air in the strange, familiar environment of this city is dense with story, and it draws me into thinking of life…

— Teju Cole

I became aware of just how fleeting the sense of happiness was, and how flimsy its basis: a warm restaurant after having…

— Teju Cole

“The thought is of the chain of corpses stretching across the Atlantic Ocean to connect Lagos with New Orleans. New Orleans was…

— Teju Cole

“And yet, and yet. This place exerts an elemental pull on me. There is no end of fascinations. People talk all the…

— Teju Cole

“Touting is not a job. It is a way of being in the world, a distillate of pure attitude: the chest puffed…

— Teju Cole

“I have not read most of the big 19th — century novels that people consider “essential,” nor most of the 20th-century ones…

— Teju Cole

“Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own…

— Teju Cole

“There was some kind of scuffle two hundred yards down the street, again strangely noiseless, and a huddled knot of men opened…

— Teju Cole

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

— Teju Cole

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

— Teju Cole

“If you're too loyal to your own suffering, you forget that others suffer, too.”

— Teju Cole

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

— Teju Cole

“Dignified refusal can only take you so far. Ask the Congolese.”

— Teju Cole

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

— Teju Cole

“I feel like a tuning fork, vibrating with an unfamiliar will to violence.”

— Teju Cole

The creative part of oneself finds its way out. In this case, I got interested particularly in the medium of Twitter and…

— Teju Cole