In 'Open City,' there is a passage that any reader of Joyce will immediately recognise as a very close, formal analogue of one the stories in 'Dubliners.' That is because a novel is also a literary conversation. — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
Sebald, Naipaul, and Joyce are three of my biggest influences, all of them for their formal freedom and their ability to create mood. So those comparisons are immensely flattering and, of course, unearned. — 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
