Best 24 quotes of Taiye Selasi on MyQuotes

Taiye Selasi

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    Taiye Selasi

    As a writer, one is obliged to release her words, to let them live in the world on their own.

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    Taiye Selasi

    As a young woman, I had been seeking experience, knowledge, truth, the stuff writers need in their work, but when the artist actually kicked in, I came to understand that in this romantic relationship I was not free to be myself, or to find myself, in order to begin the true work I needed to do.

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    Taiye Selasi

    Being a twin, and being my sister's twin, is such a defining part of my life that I wouldn't know how to be who I am, including a writer, without that being somehow at the centre.

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    Taiye Selasi

    Every Christmas, all around Ghana, there are tons of these parties and they are full of everything that exists in human life in Ghana and worldwide.

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    Taiye Selasi

    I consider myself West African, among other cultural identities, and a writer, among other creative ones.

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    Taiye Selasi

    I live in Rome and five minutes from my flat is a church where you can walk in and see this beautiful Caravaggio. Just the way this man uses dark paint: dark to create dark to create dark, the layering of the darkness in his work. I just race home: I want to create!

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    Taiye Selasi

    I'm not sure where I'm from! I was born in London. My father's from Ghana but lives in Saudi Arabia. My mother's Nigerian but lives in Ghana. I grew up in Boston.

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    Taiye Selasi

    I read recently that the problem with stereotypes isn't that they are inaccurate, but that they're incomplete. And this captures perfectly what I think about contemporary African literature. The problem isn't that it's inaccurate, it's that it's incomplete.

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    Taiye Selasi

    I've written fiction for as long as I can remember; it's always been my preferred form of play.

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    Taiye Selasi

    I was four when I announced my ambition to write, eight when I began publishing such claims.

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    Taiye Selasi

    I wouldn't mind my book being called an African novel if it didn't invite lazy readings.

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    Taiye Selasi

    I write essays to clear my mind. I write fiction to open my heart.

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    Taiye Selasi

    I wrote fiction during my entire childhood, from age 4 to 18, and started writing plays when I went to Yale and Oxford.

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    Taiye Selasi

    Sight is subjective. We learned that in class.

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    Taiye Selasi

    So often, literature about African people is conflated with literature about African politics, as if the state were somehow of greater import or interest than the individual.

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    Taiye Selasi

    The big ideas always come in flashes. I don't really craft stories that much. I genuinely don't know where these people come from and I've often wondered if writing is just a socially acceptable form of madness.

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    Taiye Selasi

    The summer I finished my first novel Ghana Must Go, I drove across west Africa: from Accra to Lomé to Cotonou to the deliciously named Ouagadougou.

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    Taiye Selasi

    The thing that comes most frequently to me on yoga retreats is excruciating pain in my hips.

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    Taiye Selasi

    The writer presents himself to the blank page not with an open passport but an open heart.

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    Taiye Selasi

    What distinguishes [Afropolitans] is a willingness to complicate Africa – namely, to engage with, critique, and celebrate the parts of Africa that mean most to them. Perhaps what most typifies the Afropolitan consciousness is the refusal to oversimplify; the effort to understand what is ailing in Africa alongside the desire to honour what is wonderful, unique. Rather than essentialising the geographical entity, we seek to comprehend the cultural complexity; to honour the intellectual and spiritual legacy; and to sustain our parents’ cultures.

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    Taiye Selasi

    When I'm working, I'm so narrowly focused on sound, language, rhythm, flow, that I rarely feel the emotion of the text. It's only after - long after - I've finished a piece that I can experience in any way its emotional charge.

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    Taiye Selasi

    When writing screenplays, it's a matter of remembering to leave off the page anything and everything that doesn't appear on the screen.

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    Taiye Selasi

    He feels a second pang now for the existence of perfection, the stubborn existence of perfection in the most vulnerable of things and in the face of his refusal-logical-admirable refusal-to engage with this existence in his heart, in his mind. For the comfortless logic, the curse of clear sight, no matter which string he pulls on the same wretched knot: (a) the futility of seeing given the fatality in a place such as this where a mother still bloody must bury her newborn, hose off, and go home to pound yam into paste; (b) the persistence of beauty, in fragility of all places!, in a dewdrop at daybreak, a thing that will end, and in moments, and in a garden, and in Ghana, lush Ghana, soft Ghana, verdant Ghana, where fragile things die.

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    Taiye Selasi

    She sleeps like a cocoyam. A thing without senses. She sleeps like his mother, unplugged from the world.