When you are writing a book, it feels as if you are simply concentrating on the world of the book and that whatever is happening in your personal life is outside the room, as it were. But maybe that's just the way you have to talk to yourself to make it possible.

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.

I think the veil is a way of taking power away from women.

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

If my child had prejudice in his head, I'd be ashamed. I would see it as my failure as a parent.

This is going to make me sound ancient, but I remember Juhu Beach when there weren't any buildings on it. You'd go through countryside and arrive at this amazing beach. I remember driving from Delhi to the Qutab Minar through countryside. Mehrauli was a little village - that's all gone.

Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.