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So often, literature about African people is conflated with literature about African politics, as if the state were somehow of greater import or interest than the individual.
Taiye Selasi
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Taiye Selasi
Age: 45
Born: 1979
Born: November 2
Photographer
Writer
London
England
Interest
Import
Individual
Imports
Often
African
States
Somehow
People
Politics
Literature
Greater
State
More quotes by Taiye Selasi
Being a twin, and being my sister's twin, is such a defining part of my life that I wouldn't know how to be who I am, including a writer, without that being somehow at the centre.
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I'm not sure where I'm from! I was born in London. My father's from Ghana but lives in Saudi Arabia. My mother's Nigerian but lives in Ghana. I grew up in Boston.
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As a writer, one is obliged to release her words, to let them live in the world on their own.
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I consider myself West African, among other cultural identities, and a writer, among other creative ones.
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As a writer, one is obliged to release her words, to let them live in the world on their own.
Taiye Selasi
The thing that comes most frequently to me on yoga retreats is excruciating pain in my hips.
Taiye Selasi
As a novelist, I ask of myself only that I tell the truth and that I tell it beautifully.
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When writing screenplays, it's a matter of remembering to leave off the page anything and everything that doesn't appear on the screen.
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The summer I finished my first novel Ghana Must Go, I drove across west Africa: from Accra to Lomé to Cotonou to the deliciously named Ouagadougou.
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I was four when I announced my ambition to write, eight when I began publishing such claims.
Taiye Selasi
I've written fiction for as long as I can remember it's always been my preferred form of play.
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Sight is subjective. We learned that in class.
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I read recently that the problem with stereotypes isn't that they are inaccurate, but that they're incomplete. And this captures perfectly what I think about contemporary African literature. The problem isn't that it's inaccurate, it's that it's incomplete.
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I wouldn't mind my book being called an African novel if it didn't invite lazy readings.
Taiye Selasi
The big ideas always come in flashes. I don't really craft stories that much. I genuinely don't know where these people come from and I've often wondered if writing is just a socially acceptable form of madness.
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I live in Rome and five minutes from my flat is a church where you can walk in and see this beautiful Caravaggio. Just the way this man uses dark paint: dark to create dark to create dark, the layering of the darkness in his work. I just race home: I want to create!
Taiye Selasi
I wrote fiction during my entire childhood, from age 4 to 18, and started writing plays when I went to Yale and Oxford.
Taiye Selasi
I was four when I announced my ambition to write, eight when I began publishing such claims.
Taiye Selasi
When writing screenplays, it's a matter of remembering to leave off the page anything and everything that doesn't appear on the screen.
Taiye Selasi
As a young woman, I had been seeking experience, knowledge, truth, the stuff writers need in their work, but when the artist actually kicked in, I came to understand that in this romantic relationship I was not free to be myself, or to find myself, in order to begin the true work I needed to do.
Taiye Selasi
