The only position when violence is threatened in response to a novel or a cartoon or a crappy YouTube video is a no-surrender position. This is how we live. We live in a country in which we have these rights, and we're not going to give them up. Full stop. The end.

[...] the inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race [...]

I needed my stuff around me, and in that little cocoon I felt good, and I could work.

Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to create literary art, and you decide to hold back, to censor yourself, then you are a fool to yourself and it would be better that you kept your mouth shut and did not speak.

At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British power. It's extraordinary that at the moment in which England was the global superpower the subject of British power appeared not to interest most writers.

Every Day Is for the Thief, by turns funny, mournful, and acerbic, offers a portrait of Nigeria in which anger, perhaps the most natural response to the often lamentable state of affairs there, is somehow muted and deflected by the author's deep engagement with the country: a profoundly disenchanted love. Teju Cole is among the most gifted writers of his generation.

There is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one's parents.