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" Religion is close to theatre; much of its power comes from the effects of staging and framing. "
Teju Cole
Power
Religion
Much
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" 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
" Never say 'I went to Harvard.' Say 'I schooled in the Boston area.' "
Teju Cole
Boston
Never
Say
" 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
" 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
" A mob is not, as is so often said, mindless. A mob is single-minded. "
Teju Cole
Mob
Said
Mindless
" 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
" 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
" 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
About
Writing
Words
" 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
" 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
" One of the chief characteristics of a mob is its quickness. It is sudden. It pounces. "
Teju Cole
Mob
Characteristics
Chief
" 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
Me
Experience
Losing
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Always say 'no pun intended' to draw attention to the intended pun. "
Teju Cole
Pun
Intended
Attention
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
Bag
You
Voice
" 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
Climb
Wind
Silence
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent. "
Teju Cole
Photography
Better
Much
" Swear you'd rather die than use 'literally' as an intensifier. "
Teju Cole
Die
You
Use
" 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