Not all coincidence has to be loaded with meaning. Sometimes, things simply recur because that's how it is in life, that's how… — 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
