Teju Cole Quotes & Sayings

I am on Vine. It's another early-adopter kind of thing. I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to do with it. What's interesting about it is that everybody knows these amazing restrictions we've put on it: I have to use my iPhone, I can only use one continuous take, I cannot edit afterwards, I cannot put sound afterwards. — Teju Cole

There's a reticence necessary when you consider the suffering of others. Into the space created by that reticence, you bring in those things that best help us confront ambiguity: music, painting, film, and so on. — Teju Cole

Then he said, Let me tell you a story from our tradition, a story about King Solomon. King Solomon gave a teaching once about the snake and the bee. The snake, King Solomon said, defends itself by killing. But the bee defends itself by dying. You know how a bee dies after a sting? Like that. It dies to defend. So, each creature has a method that is suitable to its strength. — Teju Cole

I'd like to meet fewer people who say 'Oh, I want to write a book, here are 10 pages I've written,' and more 'Oh, I want to write a book, here are 300 pages I've written.' — Teju Cole

You see, people like Ben Jelloun have the life of a writer in exile, and this gives them a certain - here Farouq paused, struggling to find the right word - it gives them a certain poeticity, can I say this, in the eyes of the West. To be a writer in exile is a great thing. But what is exile now, when everyone goes and comes freely? — Teju Cole

So, for a book set in 2006, Open City evades certain markers, while it embraces certain others. Julius doesn't use a smartphone, and he doesn't discuss contemporary US politics in any fine detail. — Teju Cole

You know that this vignette and that vignette belong side by side, you know that a certain turn of phrase you've been saving will probably work best within a given section of the narrative. As in a jazz performance, writing lives or dies by what's produced in that moment. But that moment is attended by long preparation. — Teju Cole

Tried to focus on a particular aspect of this historical moment: the failure of mourning. This is something I haven't seen a great deal of in the writing around this disaster. And my view is that you write about disaster by writing around it, by writing allusively. — Teju Cole

The Australian Gerald Murnane, a genius on the level of Beckett, is known in Australia and Sweden but almost nowhere else. And I loved Reality Hunger, David Shields' recent novel take on the art of the novel. — Teju Cole

Killing a bunch of people in Sudan and Yemen and Pakistan, it's like, "Who cares - we don't know them." But the current discussion is framed as "When can the President kill an American citizen?" Now in my mind, killing a non-American citizen without due process is just as criminal as killing an American citizen without due process - but whatever gets us to the table to discuss this thing, we're going to take it. — Teju Cole

The content of Saul Leiter's photographs arrives on a sort of delay: it takes a moment after the first glance to know what the picture is about. You don't so much see the image as let it dissolve into your consciousness, like a tablet in a glass of water. — Teju Cole

From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex. The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening. The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm. This world exists simply to satisfy the needs - including, importantly, the sentimental needs - of white people and Oprah. — Teju Cole

The dead are fully assimilated into the living, a process he called introjection. In mourning that does not proceed normally, mourning in which something has gone wrong, this benign internalization does not happen. Instead, there's an incorporation. The dead occupy only a part of the one who has survived; they are sectioned off, hidden in a crypt, and from this place of encryption they haunt the living. — Teju Cole

Breughel is an example of an artist - I mean, this is true about artists and painters in general, but he is a specific example of an artist whose work contains more than you think it does at first glance. Whose work rewards, sustains attention and looking. — Teju Cole

People choose, he said, people choose, and they choose on behalf of others. — Teju Cole

I deeply respect American sentimentality, the way one respects a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly. — Teju Cole

It has become hard to stand still, wrapped in the glory of a single image, as the original viewers of old paintings used to do. The flood of images has increased our access to wonders and at the same time lessened our sense of wonder. We live in inescapable surfeit. A number of artists are using this abundance as their starting point, setting their own cameras aside and turning to the horde - collecting and arranging photographs that they have found online. These artist-collectors, in placing one thing next to another, create a third thing - and this third thing, like a subatomic particle produced by a collision of two other particles, carries a charge. A — Teju Cole

Barack Obama is an elegant and literate man with a cosmopolitan sense of the world. He is widely read in philosophy, literature, and history - as befits a former law professor - and he has shown time and again a surprising interest in contemporary fiction. — Teju Cole

Money, dished out in quantities fitting the context, is a social lubricant here. It eases passage even as it maintains hierarchies. Fifty naira for the man who helps you back out from the parking spot, two hundred naira for the police officer who stops you for no good reason in the dead of night, ten thousand for the clearing agent who helps you bring your imported crate through customs. For each transaction, there is a suitable amount that helps things on their way. No one else seems to worry, as I do, that the money demanded by someone whose finger hovers over the trigger of a AK-47 is less a tip than a ransom. I feel that my worrying about it is a luxury that few can afford. For many Nigerians, the giving and receiving of bribes, tips, extortion money, or alms
the categories are fluid
is not thought of in moral terms. It is seen either as a mild irritant or as an opportunity. It is a way of getting things done, neither more nor less than what money is there for. — Teju Cole

I have not read most of the big 19th - century novels that people consider "essential," nor most of the 20th-century ones for that matter. But this does not embarrass me. There are many films to see, many friends to visit, many walks to take, many playlists to assemble and many favorite books to reread. Life's too short for anxious score-keeping. Also, my grandmother is illiterate, and she's one of the best people I know. Reading is a deep personal consolation for me, but other things console, too. — Teju Cole

The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten. — Teju Cole

There is much sorrow, not only of the dramatic kind but also in the way that difficult economic circumstances wear people down, eroding them, preying on their weaknesses, until they do things that they themselves find hateful, until they are shadows of their best selves. — Teju Cole

Throughout his career, W.G. Sebald wrote poems that were strikingly similar to his prose. His tone, in both genres, was always understated but possessed of a mournful grandeur. — Teju Cole

The energies of Lagos life- creative, malevolent, ambiguous- converge at the bus stops — Teju Cole

There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner ... — Teju Cole

In countries with a properly functioning legal system, the mob continues to exist, but it is rarely called upon to mete out capital punishment. The right to take human life belongs to the state. Not so in societies where weak courts and poor law enforcement are combined with intractable structural injustices. — Teju Cole

What's interesting about Twitter is the unmediatedness of it, the directness of it. I'm on a train somewhere in New York and I send out a tweet. Somebody sitting at dinner in Bombay checks their phone and they see it. — Teju Cole

And it is these heavily armed and poorly paid men who are entrusted with the work of protecting the citizenry. — Teju Cole

It takes a few years to understand what we've lived through. At the moment, we're still sort of mired in the irrelevant bullshit. There isn't yet that public conversation about 9/11. — Teju Cole

Originality is little more
than the fine blending of influences. — Teju Cole

We don't experience our lives as plots. If I asked you to tell me what your last week was like, you're not really gonna give me plot. You're gonna give me sort of linked narrative. And I wanted to see how do we bring that into fiction without losing the reader. — Teju Cole

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

I'm not hopeful about America, and I'm not hopeful about the world, no. Life goes on and, for those of us who are lucky, there's a great deal to enjoy in it. But will things get better for most people? I don't know. I don't see the evidence. — Teju Cole

It was I, no less solitary than he but having made the lesser use of the morning, who was to be pitied. — Teju Cole

I schooled in the Boston area. — Teju Cole

There are other writers whose work is connected with everyday life and with the history of the people. And this doesn't mean they have any connection to nationalist ideals. Sometimes, they even suffer more at the hands of nationalists. — Teju Cole

Life's too short for anxious score-keeping — Teju Cole

I wouldn't have thought her young enough, as I had put her age somewhere north of forty. — Teju Cole

When I write, I have a sort of secret kinship of readers in all countries who don't know each other but each of whom, when they read my book, feels at home in it. So I write for those readers. It's almost a sense of writing for a specific person, but it's a specific person who I don't know. — Teju Cole

On many days my primary artistic struggle is, in fact, photography because it is harder to do good work with that. I see myself as an observer of the world who has a strong drive to testify, which I can do because I have the privilege of living in New York with enough food to eat and shelter. — Teju Cole

At the emergence of the modern novel with Rabelais and Cervantes, all kinds of things were possible in a long-form prose work. Within a couple of hundred years, most of those possibilities were abandoned in favor of a text that efficiently transmitted sentiments. — Teju Cole

Joyce's writing in Dubliners contains some of the most unshowily beautiful sentences in the English language. I learned from him that if you write a good, clean line of English, you can get under a reader's skin. The reader won't even know why, but there you are. Didion, Berger, the many others I mentioned above, and many, many poets I haven't mentioned. Writers of this calibre are the moving targets the rest of us are always chasing. — Teju Cole

One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent. — Teju Cole

Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not villains of our own stories. — Teju Cole

I often paint a detailed picture in my mind of what I would like the end of my life to look like. I think of saying goodbye to Clara and other people I love, then I picture an empty house, perhaps a large, rambling rural mansion somewhere near the marshes where I grew up; I imagine a bath upstairs, which I can fill with warm water; and I think of music playing all through this big house, Crescent, maybe, or Ascension, filling the spaces not taken up by my solitude, reaching me in the bath, so that when I slip across the one-way border, I do so to the accompaniment of modal harmonies heard from far away. — Teju Cole

But I didn't, because I knew that my own fear of anti-Semitism, like my fear of racism, had through long practice become prerational. What I would impose on him would not be an argument, it would be a request that he adopt my reflexes, or the pieties of a society different from the one in which he grew up, or the one in which he now functioned. It would do little good to describe for him the subtle shades of meaning evoked in an American ear by saying "Jews" instead of "Jewish people. — Teju Cole

In a sense, Open City is a kind of Wunderkammer, one of those little rooms assembled with bric-a-brac by Renaissance scholars. I don't mean it as a term of praise: these cabinets of curiousities contained specific sorts of objects - maps, skulls (as memento mori), works of art, stuffed animals, natural history samples, and books - and Open City actually contains many of the same sort of objects. So, I don't think it's as simple as literary inclusiveness. — Teju Cole

The strange thing, though, is that most people who write novels these days seem to be aware of only a fraction of its possibilities. Kundera goes on and on about this, and I never tire of reading him on the subject, because I agree very deeply with it. — Teju Cole

American racism has many moving parts, and has had enough centuries in which to evolve an impressive camouflage. It can hoard its malice in great stillness for a long time, all the while pretending to look the other way. Like misogyny, it is atmospheric. You don't see it at first. But understanding comes. — Teju Cole

To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone. — Teju Cole

Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks. — Teju Cole

My own literary interest is more about excavating the past, or sensing the past inside the present. This requires all kinds of exclusions and sleights of hand. There's an admittedly antiquarian flavor to it, even though there's enough of the present included to lull the reader. — Teju Cole

I was in New York City on 9/11. Grief remains from that awful day, but not only grief. There is fear, too, a fear informed by the knowledge that whatever my worst nightmare is, there is someone out there embittered enough to carry it out. — Teju Cole

These were the rare cases in which you gave permission to a stranger to enter your personal space. You trusted the expertise proffered, and enjoyed the promise that the opaque maneuvers of this stranger's hands would yield a result. The tailor, simply by doing his job that day, comforted me. — Teju Cole

For purposes of marketing, writers are designated as poets, novelists, or something else. But writing is about matchmaking, an attempt to marry sensations with apt words. — Teju Cole

The details were saccharine, but they could not obscure the force and beauty of the painting. — Teju Cole

I'm not trying to be in your face and take a picture that is like a journalistic kind of image. I got interested in a kind of complicated, compiled, visual field. — Teju Cole

I am suspicious of writers who say their work is original and influenced by nobody. If it is, it is probably uninteresting. The biggest source of novels is other novels. — Teju Cole

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 writer. I'm an African writer. I'm a Yoruba writer. I'm an African American writer. — Teju Cole

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 anything I might be able to come up with on a single given day. — Teju Cole

There was some kind of scuffle two hundred yards down the street, again strangely noiseless, and a huddled knot of men opened up to reveal two brawlers being separated and pulled away from their fight. What I saw next gave me a fright: in the farther distance, beyond the listless crowd, the body of a lynched man dangling from a tree. The body was slender, dressed from head to toe in black, reflecting no light. It soon resolved itself, however, into a less ominous thing: dark canvas sheeting on a construction scaffold, twirling in the wind. — Teju Cole

I had hoped for grace," I said, "not immortality"
I wonder why so many people view sickness as a moral test. It has nothing to do with morals or grace. It's a physical test, and usually we lose. — Teju Cole

I must say, I'm ready to go into the forest. I am ready to go in. It is time for me to enter the forest and lie down, and let the lions come for me. I've done enough, I think, I've had a good life, and I'm in such terrible pain just now. — Teju Cole

Not explicitly, no. Compared to this enormous, relentless evolutionary activity in the built environment, writing is small potatoes. — Teju Cole

Probably the biggest temptation that young writers face is to be entertaining, to show your bag of tricks and do a bit of tap dancing. I read a lot of things, and I keep seeing this brocade of voice where someone is trying to be too pally with you or ingratiating on the page. — Teju Cole

From where I stood, the Statue of Liberty was a flourescent green fleck against the sky, and beyond her sat Ellis Island, the focus of so many myths; but it had been built too late for those early Africans - who weren't immigrants in any case - and it had been closed too soon to mean anything to the later Africans like Kenneth, or the cabdriver, or me. — Teju Cole

And, he added with a laugh, you don't ever notice your oxygen until it's gone: something goes wrong with the HVAC, even for fifteen minutes, and people are ready to riot. — Teju Cole

There are many people who know nothing of a world in which we take the reality of the 'other' seriously. I'm running on that platform: other people in other countries are really, really real, and there has to be a way of presenting their reality that is not condescending to them or about our psycho-social needs. — Teju Cole

Still, there's that faint glimmer of hope we feel when we sense, in other people, the same kind of attentiveness to life that we take comfort in. Why else would anyone watch Haneke films or read Sebald? The material is grim, but it's redeemed by the quality of the attention. — Teju Cole

I probably get a deeper satisfaction of having taken a very good photograph than of having written something very good, a very good story. Maybe it's because the element of magic is so present in a good photograph - luck and magic, but also hard work and being ready and all that. — Teju Cole

Old-school hip hop, i.e., whatever was popular when you were nineteen, is great. Everything since then is intolerable. — Teju Cole

But a book suggests conversation: one person is speaking to another, and audible sound is, or should be, natural to that exchange. So I read aloud with myself as the audience, and gave voice to another's words. — Teju Cole

The shape the words end up taking are themselves the meaning of the words, they are retrospectively what we meant to say. There's no way of knowing this until you register it in visible form. But the other side of this is that you do have some idea of where you are going. — Teju Cole

Malcolm X recognized that difference contains its own value, and that the struggle must be to advance that value. Martin Luther King is admired by everyone, he wants everyone to join together, but this idea that you should let them hit you on the other side of your face, this makes no sense to me. — Teju Cole

Everything interesting was in the books; it was books that made me aware of the variety of the world. — Teju Cole

The fratricidal Yoruba wars of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a great boost to the transatlantic traffic in human beings. There were constant skirmishes between the Ijebus, the Egbas, the Ekitis, the Oyos, the Ibadans, and many other Yoruba groups. Some of the smaller groups might even have been wiped out from history, as the larger ones enlarged their territory and consolidated their power. The vanquished were brought from the interior to the coast and sold to the people of Lagos and to communities along the network of lagoons stretching westward to Ouidah. And they in turn arranged the auctions at which the English, the Portuguese, and the Spanish loaded up their barracoons and slave ships. Some of these intertribal wars were waged for the express purpose of supplying slaves to traders. At thirty-five British pounds for each healthy adult male, it was a lucrative business. — Teju Cole

Love perhaps includes the promise that when the mob comes for you I'll go against the mob. — Teju Cole

We experience life as a continuity, and only after it falls away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities. The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float. — Teju Cole

It's a test case of what I believe; people can live together but still keep their own values intact. Seeing this crowd of individuals from different places, it appeals to the human side of me, and the intellectual side of me. — Teju Cole

Concentration, the suspension of time, an unobtrusive wit. — Teju Cole

What are the important issues there? Khalil asked. What do left and right disagree on? As I began to answer him, as I enumerated the divisive issues, I felt faintly embarrassed at how tawdry they were: abortion, homosexuality, gun control - Khalil looked confused by that last term, and Farouq said des armes. — Teju Cole

We have for too long been taught that the sight of a man speaking to himself is a sign of eccentricity or madness; we are no longer at all habituated to our own voices, except in conversation or from within the safety of a shouting crowd. — Teju Cole

The novelist loses, every time. Politics is insidious, the modern conduct of war (from shoulder-launched rockets to drone strikes) is insidious. Someone presses a button in California and twenty people are incinerated at a wedding in Pakistan. The killer is spared the sight of the corpses. — Teju Cole

The completeness of a child is the most fragile and most powerful thing in the world. A child's confidence is the world's wonder. — Teju Cole

Africa was always waiting, a substrate for the white man's will, a backdrop for his activities...I was primed to see a white man, a nobody in his own country, who thought, as usual, that the salvation of Africa was up to him. — Teju Cole

There had been a scandal: a year previously, the chair, Professor Gregoriades, had been accused of using a derogatory term in reference to some Asian patients. — Teju Cole

I'm grateful for the likes of Kundera, Murnane, Markson, Berger, and, in his recent work, Coetzee. But no matter how celebrated they are, critics still consider them askance. Elizabeth Costello, for example, is a great novel, but it got quite a critical panning when it was published. The complaint was that it was simply a book of speeches, without the machinery of conventional fiction. Markson's books are compilations of facts and alleged facts, very artfully. — Teju Cole

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

Not in this specific form. But all great cities are inhabited by ghosts. A book of this kind could probably be written about Jakarta, Manila, or London by anyone who had a feeling for the invisible truths of those places. — Teju Cole

It is dangerous to live in a secure world. — Teju Cole

A mob is not, as is so often said, mindless. A mob is single-minded. — Teju Cole

It was from him, and from this picture in particular, that Henri Cartier-Bresson had developed the ideal of the decisive moment. Photography seemed to me, as I stood there in the white gallery with its rows of pictures and its press of murmuring spectators, an uncanny art like no other. One moment, in all of history, was captured, but the moments before and after it disappeared into the onrush of time; only that selected moment itself was privileged, saved, for no other reason than its having been picked out by the camera's eye. — Teju Cole

He, too, was in the grip of rage and rhetoric. I saw that, attractive though his side of the political spectrum was. A cancerous violence had eaten into every political idea, had taken over the ideas themselves, and for so many, all that mattered was the willingness to do something. Action led to action, free of any moorings, and the way to be someone, the way to catch the attention of the young and recruit them to one's cause, was to be enraged. It seemed as if the only way this lure of violence could be avoided was by having no causes, by being magnificiently isolated from loyalties. But was that not an ethical lapse graver than rage itself? — Teju Cole

The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm. — Teju Cole

Swear you'd rather die than use 'literally' as an intensifier. — Teju Cole

The doors of our fridges, glimpses of cleavage, images of our birthday cakes, the setting sun: cheap photography makes visible the ways in which we are similar, and have for a long time been similar. Now we have proof, again, and again, and again. The — Teju Cole

Unlike those other painters, Brewster hadn't resorted to indirect gazes or chiaroscuro to communicate the silence of his world. The faces were well-lit and frontal, and yet they were quiet. — Teju Cole

Each time I caught sight of geese swooping in formation across the sky, I wondered how our life below might look from their perspective, and imagined that, were they ever to indulge in such speculation, the high-rises might seem to them like firs massed in a grove. — Teju Cole

Lyrical poetry is not a big part of most people's lives. Twitter now becomes an interesting way of getting cared for language into people's space. Because there is something deep inside of us that responds to cared for language, whether it's literary, poetry, or really good lyrics in a song. — Teju Cole

Freud suggested that, in normal mourning, one internalizes the dead. The dead are fully assimilated into the living, a process he called introjection. — Teju Cole