Teju Cole Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
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I wanted my children to have the same exposure to the water I had. My strongest memories of Northeast Harbor are going in a small Whaler with my dad, looking for osprey.
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I don't have a telephone. If I had a lot of money, I wouldn't have one.
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I find the whole situation of confronting an audience terrifying.
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Not long ago I made a list of Doc Ford books I would like to do, and I came up with 11 pretty easily. I like to let the characters go their own ways and see what happens. I find them fascinating.
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All I remember is the last time I played a videogame, it was Space Invaders.
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But, I couldn't live without creation gymnastics.
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The ability to calibrate risk doesn't happen rationally.
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When you do something with a lot of honesty, appetite and commitment, the input reflects in the output.
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The most common criticism I've seen is that I write 'popcorn fantasy:' lightweight action-adventure. Some people call it that as they explain why they love it for exactly that reason. I'm cool with that, either way. I just nod and let it go.
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Everybody wants to defeat the defending champs.
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Films, fiction, can encompass a whole global vision on a particular subject with any story, whatever it is. You can play the story in whatever country with whatever language in whatever style you want to tell the story in.
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If you want to humble an empire, it makes sense to maim its cathedrals. They are symbols of its faith, and when they crumple and burn, it tells us we are not so powerful and we can't be safe.
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I was four when I announced my ambition to write, eight when I began publishing such claims.
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I couldn't do what I do day-in and day-out if I didn't love the game.
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I'll never look down on and I love running into actors who say 'Oh yeah, I did a soap.' I say 'Tell me which one!' It's like being a member of a secret society.
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Seven social sins: politics without principles, wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, and worship without sacrifice.
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I used to see media on Althea Flynt and she was very wild looking. She had a mohawk and she published Hustler-I thought that was crazy. But when you study her, she was so innocent and frail and sort of birdlike, and sweet. She stayed sweet until she died, but I don't know what happened for her to get into drugs or the things she got into.
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We thought we were going to go up against SNL on Saturday Nights - that would have changed things so much that it's almost impossible to speculate what might have happened.
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That’s when I felt it. One thin finger. Gently touching my thigh. I kept talking about how alpha loses two protons and two neutrons, like his finger wasn’t on my thigh. And I think he liked that, because he kept asking questions, as if his finger weren’t on my thigh.
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It is useless to contend with the irresistible power of Time, which goes on continually creating by a process of constant destruction.
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I'm a trumpet player, and I sing jazz.
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College and the responsibilities that came with it helped me transition from teenager to adulthood.
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From an early age she had developed the art of being alone and generally preferred her own company to anyone else’s. She read books at enormous speed and judged them entirely on her ability to remove her from her material surroundings. In almost all the unhappiest days of her life she had been able to escape from her own inner world by living temporarily in someone else’s, and on the two or three occasions that she had been too upset to concentrate she had been desolate.
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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.
