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" 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
Nobody
I Am
Original
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" One of the chief characteristics of a mob is its quickness. It is sudden. It pounces. "
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Chief
" 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
Good
Food
Myself
" 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
Expensive
Land
Only
" 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
Like
Life
Look
" Religion is close to theatre; much of its power comes from the effects of staging and framing. "
Teju Cole
Power
Religion
Much
" The original sense of the word 'influence' is 'to flow into.' For the most part, these writers that I admire... their style flows into me without my intervention, which is what explains the broad range of writers who I've been compared with; it reflects my reading. "
Teju Cole
Style
Flow
Influence
" Swear you'd rather die than use 'literally' as an intensifier. "
Teju Cole
Die
You
Use
" 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
World
Know
People
" 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
Madness
Long
Conversation
" 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
You
True
Artist
" 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
Years
Feeling
Complexity
" 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
Know
You
Water
" Punitive murder by the police and by vigilantes has existed in all societies at some point, and probably still exists in most. "
Teju Cole
Some
Still
Point
" 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
Love
Labels
American
" 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
Writing
Art
Experience
" 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
Fear
Day
New York
" I'm not trying to be a poet on Twitter; I'm trying to be aware of the fact that a very simple sentence, well written, can have a very moving effect without that person knowing why. There's a deep genetic part of you that somehow, even without your permission, recognizes good language when it arrives. "
Teju Cole
Good
Simple
Moving
" 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
I Am
Good
Not Knowing
" 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
Person
Writing
Sense
" 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
Conversation
Stories
Open
" 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
Luck
Work
Story
" 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
Career
Grandeur
Tone
" Old-school hip hop, i.e., whatever was popular when you were nineteen, is great. Everything since then is intolerable. "
Teju Cole
Everything
Great
Then
" A mob is not, as is so often said, mindless. A mob is single-minded. "
Teju Cole
Mob
Said
Mindless
" 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
I Am
Interesting
Kind
" Always say 'no pun intended' to draw attention to the intended pun. "
Teju Cole
Pun
Intended
Attention
" 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
Sense
Man
History
" 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
City
Hope
Long
" 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
Mind
Space
Alive
" The most common thing I find is very brilliant, acute, young people who want to become writers but they are not writing. You know, they really badly want to write a book but they are not writing it. The only advice I can give them is to just write it, get to the end of it. And, you know, if it's not good enough, write another one. "
Teju Cole
Book
End
Good