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Not explicitly, no. Compared to this enormous, relentless evolutionary activity in the built environment, writing is small potatoes.
Teju Cole
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Teju Cole
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: June 27
Art Historian
Photographer
Writer
Michigan
United States
Small
Evolutionary
Writing
Relentless
Potatoes
Compared
Enormous
Activity
Built
Environment
Explicitly
More quotes by Teju Cole
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
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
One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent.
Teju Cole
What's interesting about Twitter is the unmediatedness of it, the directness of it. I'm on a train somewhere in New York and I send out a tweet. Somebody sitting at dinner in Bombay checks their phone and they see it.
Teju Cole
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
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
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
The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten.
Teju Cole
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
Love perhaps includes the promise that when the mob comes for you I'll go against the mob.
Teju Cole
It is dangerous to live in a secure world.
Teju Cole
I just realized that we're facing here is an empathy gap. And this was just another way to generate conversation about something that nobody wanted to look at.
Teju Cole
The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.
Teju Cole
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
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
Always say no pun intended to draw attention to the intended pun.
Teju Cole
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
It wasn't a deception: all lovers live on partial knowledge.
Teju Cole
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
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