I am suspicious of writers who say their work is original and influenced by nobody. If it is, it is probably uninteresting.… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
I often say I've spent more time with photography than I have with literature just in terms of hours. — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
My own literary interest is more about excavating the past, or sensing the past inside the present. This requires all kinds of… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
The strange thing, though, is that most people who write novels these days seem to be aware of only a fraction of… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
The Australian Gerald Murnane, a genius on the level of Beckett, is known in Australia and Sweden but almost nowhere else. And… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
Not in this specific form. But all great cities are inhabited by ghosts. A book of this kind could probably be written… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
It's an Obama book, certainly. I was delighted, and astonished, to hear recently that he was reading it. It's a book about… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
In 'Open City,' there is a passage that any reader of Joyce will immediately recognise as a very close, formal analogue of… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
When I write, I have a sort of secret kinship of readers in all countries who don't know each other but each… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“I have not read most of the big 19th — century novels that people consider “essential,” nor most of the 20th-century ones… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
Joyce's writing in Dubliners contains some of the most unshowily beautiful sentences in the English language. I learned from him that if… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
But a book suggests conversation: one person is speaking to another, and audible sound is, or should be, natural to that exchange.… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
Barack Obama is an elegant and literate man with a cosmopolitan sense of the world. He is widely read in philosophy, literature,… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
So, for a book set in 2006, Open City evades certain markers, while it embraces certain others. Julius doesn't use a smartphone,… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
At the emergence of the modern novel with Rabelais and Cervantes, all kinds of things were possible in a long-form prose work.… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
Yes, there's a relaying of internal states that only a novel can achieve. In my view, the novel is one of Europe's… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
To read Transtromer - the best times are at night, in silence, and alone - is to surrender to the far-fetched. It… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
The most common thing I find is very brilliant, acute, young people who want to become writers but they are not writing.… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent. — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
Note-taking is important to me: a week's worth of reading notes (or "thoughts I had in the shower" notes) is cumulatively more interesting than… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
It's an Obama book, certainly. I was delighted, and astonished, to hear recently that he was reading it. It's a book about a new… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
Because I'm an art historian, I have some experience of writing that comes out of close attention. That's what really art history is. You're… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
For purposes of marketing, writers are designated as poets, novelists, or something else. But writing is about matchmaking, an attempt to marry sensations with… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
“Most of the people around me yesterday were middle-aged or old. I am used to it, but it never ceases to surprise me how… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
“The mind roams more widely in the dark than it does in light. It is no surprise, then, stepping out of the unlit house… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
“Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
Writing as writing. Writing as rioting. Writing as righting. On the best days, all three. — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
“The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten...Generations rushed through the eye of the needle, and I, one of… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
“As I contemplated the silent world before me, I thought of the many romantic ideas attached to blindness. Ideas of unusual sensitivity and genius… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
