Teju Cole Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

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• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

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• 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

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• 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

  4 Copy quote

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

  Teju Cole

  Evil, World, Enthusiasm

  Teju Cole (2016). “Known and Strange Things”, p.240, Faber & Faber

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• I schooled in the Boston area.

  Teju Cole

  Boston, Schooled, Areas

  Teju Cole (2016). “Known and Strange Things”, p.59, Faber & Faber

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• 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

  Writing, Marketing, Novelists

  "My hero: Michael Ondaatje by Teju Cole" by Teju Cole, www.theguardian.com. February 17, 2012.

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• 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

  Mean, Self, Stories

  Teju Cole (2011). “Open City”, p.243, Faber & Faber

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• 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

  Glasses, Water, Firsts

  Teju Cole (2016). “Known and Strange Things”, p.104, Faber & Faber

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• Always say no pun intended to draw attention to the intended pun.

  Teju Cole

  Attention, Pun, Draws

  Teju Cole (2016). “Known and Strange Things”, p.59, Faber & Faber

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