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
For purposes of marketing, writers are designated as poets, novelists, or something else. But writing is about matchmaking, an attempt to marry… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
Not explicitly, no. Compared to this enormous, relentless evolutionary activity in the built environment, writing is small potatoes. — 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
Because I'm an art historian, I have some experience of writing that comes out of close attention. That's what really art history… — 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
I suddenly feel a vague pity for all those writers who have to ply their trade from sleepy American suburbs, writing divorce… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
The original sense of the word 'influence' is 'to flow into.' For the most part, these writers that I admire... their style… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
tried to focus on a particular aspect of this historical moment: the failure of mourning. This is something I haven't seen a… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
Oh, I love labels, as long as they are numerous. I'm an American writer. I'm a Nigerian writer. I'm a Nigerian American… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
Oh, I love labels, as long as they are numerous. I'm an American writer. I'm a Nigerian writer. I'm a Nigerian American… — 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
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
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
Probably the biggest temptation that young writers face is to be entertaining, to show your bag of tricks and do a bit… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
Throughout his career, W.G. Sebald wrote poems that were strikingly similar to his prose. His tone, in both genres, was always understated… — 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
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 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
