I'm not trying to be in your face and take a picture that is like a journalistic kind of image. I got interested in a kind of complicated, compiled, visual field. Teju Cole More Quotes by Teju Cole More Quotes From Teju Cole Life's too short for anxious score-keeping Teju Cole score anxious too-short 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 novelists marketing writing 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 self stories mean It wasn't a deception: all lovers live on partial knowledge. Teju Cole deception lovers 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 I became aware of just how fleeting the sense of happiness was, and how flimsy its basis: a warm restaurant after having come in from the rain, the smell of food and wine, interesting conversation, daylight falling weakly on the polished cherrywood of the tables. It took so little to move the mood from one level to another, as one might push pieces on a chessboard. Even to be aware of this, in the midst of a happy moment, was to push one of those pieces, and to become slightly less happy. Teju Cole rain fall moving There was a feeling during the years of George W. Bushs 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 feelings war years Always say no pun intended to draw attention to the intended pun. Teju Cole pun draws attention In countries with a properly functioning legal system, the mob continues to exist, but it is rarely called upon to mete out capital punishment. The right to take human life belongs to the state. Not so in societies where weak courts and poor law enforcement are combined with intractable structural injustices. Teju Cole legal punishment law life 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 good you not-good-enough people 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 good hard-work luck work 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 man time history world 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 think not-knowing I am on Vine. It's another early-adopter kind of thing. I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to do with it. What's interesting about it is that everybody knows these amazing restrictions we've put on it: I have to use my iPhone, I can only use one continuous take, I cannot edit afterwards, I cannot put sound afterwards. Teju Cole iphone i-am amazing i-can Never say 'I went to Harvard.' Say 'I schooled in the Boston area.' Teju Cole say never boston harvard Old-school hip hop, i.e., whatever was popular when you were nineteen, is great. Everything since then is intolerable. Teju Cole whatever everything great you Swear you'd rather die than use 'literally' as an intensifier. Teju Cole die you swear use Religion is close to theatre; much of its power comes from the effects of staging and framing. Teju Cole close theatre power religion 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 drones pakistan land expensive 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 city day fear knowledge
