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 novelist loses, every time. Politics is insidious, the modern conduct of war (from shoulder-launched rockets to drone strikes) is insidious. Someone… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
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 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
Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
There are many people who know nothing of a world in which we take the reality of the 'other' seriously. I'm running… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
Still, there's that faint glimmer of hope we feel when we sense, in other people, the same kind of attentiveness to life… — 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
I'm not hopeful about America, and I'm not hopeful about the world, no. Life goes on and, for those of us who… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
Lyrical poetry is not a big part of most people's lives. Twitter now becomes an interesting way of getting cared for language… — 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
