Sebald, Naipaul, and Joyce ...

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.
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

More phrases

Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.
 William Ellery Channing
Everything you are against weakens you. Everything you are for empowers you.
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
 Richard Grenier
Nothing is so strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as real strength.
 Saint Francis de Sales
For a human being, sadness is as powerful as terror. Sadness makes a warrior shed tears of blood.

Quotes from the same author

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.
 Teju Cole
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.
 Teju Cole
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.
 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