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.

Speaking as somebody with three sisters and a very largely female Muslim family, there is not a single woman I know in my family or in their friends who would have accepted the wearing of a veil.

I've never had very high regard for therapists. I owe my health, my mental survival, to my friends and loved ones.

Certainly, the Hollywood cinema, there's almost nothing of interest coming out of there.

The answer to religion is not no religion, but another way of thinking of it. Another way of being in it.

Writers have been in terrible situations and have yet managed to produce extraordinary work.

perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque.