I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn’t have a point. – Teju Cole
Old-school hip hop, i.e., whatever was popular when you were nineteen, is great. Everything since then is intolerable. – 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
One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent. – Teju Cole
Punitive murder by the police and by vigilantes has existed in all societies at some point, and probably still exists in most. – 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
There was a feeling during the years of George W. Bush’s presidency that his gracelessness as well as his appetite for war were linked to his impatience with complexity. He acted ‘from the gut,’ and was economical with the truth until it disappeared. – Teju Cole
Where land mines are indiscriminate, cheap, and brutal, drones are discriminate, expensive, and brutal. And yet they are insufficiently discriminate: the assassination of the Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud in Pakistan in 2009 succeeded only on the seventeenth attempt. – Teju Cole
To read Transtromer – the best times are at night, in silence, and alone – is to surrender to the far-fetched. It is to climb out of bed and listen to what the house is saying, and to how the wind outside responds. Each of his readers reads him as a personal secret. – 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
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
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 looking at something very closely, and you try to write in a meticulous way about it. – 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
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
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
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
In a Transtromer poem, you inhabit space differently; a body becomes a thing, a mind floats, things have lives, and even non-things, even concepts, are alive. – Teju Cole
When I’ve had enough of words, I go out into the city for a long walk; sometimes I’ll go out walking for several miles. And I’ll just take photographs and hope for something striking or unusual to happen that I can organize into a picture frame. – 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
Religion is close to theatre; much of its power comes from the effects of staging and framing. – 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
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
