Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I schooled in the Boston area.
It is dangerous to live in a secure world.
Life's too short for anxious score-keeping
Things don't go away just because you choose to forget them.
I adore imaginary monsters, but I am terrified of real ones.
It wasn't a deception: all lovers live on partial knowledge.
Swear you'd rather die than use 'literally' as an intensifier.
I couldn't remember what life was like before I started walking.
Always say no pun intended to draw attention to the intended pun.
Never say 'I went to Harvard.' Say 'I schooled in the Boston area.'
Always say 'no pun intended' to draw attention to the intended pun.
A MOB is not, as is so often said, mindless. A MOB is single-minded.
The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten.
One of the chief characteristics of a mob is its quickness. It is sudden. It pounces.
The energies of Lagos life- creative, malevolent, ambiguous- converge at the bus stops
Writing as writing. Writing as rioting. Writing as righting. On the best days, all three.
Love perhaps includes the promise that when the mob comes for you I'll go against the mob.
There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner.
Religion is close to theatre; much of its power comes from the effects of staging and framing.
I often say I've spent more time with photography than I have with literature just in terms of hours.
One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent.
Old-school hip hop, i.e., whatever was popular when you were nineteen, is great. Everything since then is intolerable.
Punitive murder by the police and by vigilantes has existed in all societies at some point, and probably still exists in most.
The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening.
The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.
The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.
Not explicitly, no. Compared to this enormous, relentless evolutionary activity in the built environment, writing is small potatoes.
I deeply respect American sentimentality, the way one respects a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly.
Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not villains of our own stories.
The creative part of oneself finds its way out. In this case, I got interested particularly in the medium of Twitter and looked for ways to use it creatively.
In a Transtromer poem, you inhabit space differently; a body becomes a thing, a mind floats, things have lives, and even non-things, even concepts, are alive.
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.
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.
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.
You don't bring in a gay character as a way of commenting on gay issues. You have one there because he's real, and that's his life, no less so than your life is yours.
I am suspicious of writers who say their work is original and influenced by nobody. If it is, it is probably uninteresting. The biggest source of novels is other novels.
To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone.
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.
I'd like to meet fewer people who say 'Oh, I want to write a book, here are 10 pages I've written,' and more 'Oh, I want to write a book, here are 300 pages I've written.'
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.
Throughout his career, W.G. Sebald wrote poems that were strikingly similar to his prose. His tone, in both genres, was always understated but possessed of a mournful grandeur.
I suddenly feel a vague pity for all those writers who have to ply their trade from sleepy American suburbs, writing divorce scenes symbolized by the very slow washing of dishes.
It takes a few years to understand what we've lived through. At the moment, we're still sort of mired in the irrelevant bullshit. There isn't yet that public conversation about 9/11.
So, for a book set in 2006, Open City evades certain markers, while it embraces certain others. Julius doesn't use a smartphone, and he doesn't discuss contemporary US politics in any fine detail.
Being Nigerian is a strong part of my identity. Being American is a strong part of my identity. And there are important parts of who I am that really have nothing to do with my national connection.
Oh, I love labels, as long as they are numerous. I'm an American writer. I'm a Nigerian writer. I'm a Nigerian American writer. I'm an African writer. I'm a Yoruba writer. I'm an African American writer.
Echo is very important to me. I love the repetition of motifs, or the slight alteration of what's been said before. This is part of how one creates a mood, a psychological caul, in fact, around the reader.
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.
Note-taking is important to me: a week's worth of reading notes (or "thoughts I had in the shower" notes) is cumulatively more interesting than anything I might be able to come up with on a single given day.
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.