Latest Teju Cole Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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

  People, Quality, Comfort

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• You don't bring in a gay character as a way of commenting on gay issues. You have one there because he's real, and that's his life, no less so than your life is yours.

  Teju Cole

  Real, Character, Gay

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• 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

  America, People, Hopeful

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• 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

  Beautiful, Moving, Writing

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• 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 kind of American reality, one that takes diversity for granted. It doesn't celebrate diversity, actually, it just says: this is how we live now.

  Teju Cole

  Book, Reading, Reality

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• 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

  Three, Influence, Mood

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• Echo is very important to me. I love the repetition of motifs, or the slight alteration of what's been said before. This is part of how one creates a mood, a psychological caul, in fact, around the reader.

  Teju Cole

  Echoes, Important, Facts

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• Not all coincidence has to be loaded with meaning. Sometimes, things simply recur because that's how it is in life, that's how the mood gets in. It's good to subtly overdo it too, as Nabokov does, as Sebald does. It's a good way to intensify that region of localized weather that we call a novel.

  Teju Cole

  Weather, Doe, Way

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• The novelist can't successfully depict such horrifying reality. But she can, and must, try, to bear witness. There are many ways of doing this; the mode I prefer is indirect.

  Teju Cole

  Reality, Trying, Novelists

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• 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

  Grateful, Book, Speech

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• 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

  Art, Reality, Australia

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• 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

  War, California, Sight

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• 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

  Couple, Years, Modern Novel

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• Yes, there's a relaying of internal states that only a novel can achieve. In my view, the novel is one of Europe's greatest gifts to the world. America and Africa collaborated to give the world jazz. We'll call it even.

  Teju Cole

  America, Views, Europe

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• 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

  Reading, Writing, People

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• It is a work of psychogeography, albeit in a less explicit sense than Iain Sinclair's or Will Self's. It had to be fiction though, because I needed that freedom of including whatever belonged, and cutting out whatever didn't. The main fiction in it was matching Julius' generous and self-concealing character to New York's generous and self-concealing character. I think this also adds to my answer about New York's personality in the book.

  Teju Cole

  New York, Book, Character

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• 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

  Book, Cities, Feelings

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• 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

  Suffering Of Others, Space, Helping

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• 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

  Years, Bullshit, Moments

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• Our biggest art forms are film and television, and there hasn't been a great film about 9/11 yet, nor has there been a great television series. Something like The Wire gives us a rich and fully achieved picture of the wasteful, cruel War on Drugs; something like The White Ribbon gives a perspective on World War I that could only have been presented long after the event itself.

  Teju Cole

  Art, War, White

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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

  Teju Cole

  Writing, Potatoes, Environment

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• 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

  Writing, Views, Focus

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• 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

  Past, Hands, Flavor

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• 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

  Book, Smartphones, Cities

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

• 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

  Writing, Long, Preparation

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com