Teju Cole
Teju Cole
Teju Coleis a Nigerian-American writer, photographer, and art historian...
NationalityNigerian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth27 June 1975
CityKalamazoo, MI
CountryNigeria
views europe america
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.
world dangerous secure
It is dangerous to live in a secure world.
rain moving fall
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.
expectations sin sinner
There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner...
bus-stops creative energy
The energies of Lagos life- creative, malevolent, ambiguous- converge at the bus stops
writing marketing purpose
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.
attention pun draws
Always say no pun intended to draw attention to the intended pun.
war years feelings
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.
suffering-of-others space helping
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.
sky indulge-in sight
Each time I caught sight of geese swooping in formation across the sky, I wondered how our life below might look from their perspective, and imagined that, were they ever to indulge in such speculation, the high-rises might seem to them like firs massed in a grove.
hero mean self
Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people's stories, insofar as these stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic.
fall past space
We experience life as a continuity, and only after it falls away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities. The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float.
couple years modern-novel
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.
book voice sound
But a book suggests conversation: one person is speaking to another, and audible sound is, or should be, natural to that exchange. So I read aloud with myself as the audience, and gave voice to another's words.