Taiye Selasi Quotes

#1. He was bound inside this body, trapped, an airborne being caged. In

Taiye Selasi

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

Taiye Selasi

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

Taiye Selasi

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

Taiye Selasi

#5. There was the one basic storyline, which everyone knew, with the few custom endings to choose now and again. Basic: humming grandmas and polycentric dancing and drinks made from tree sap and patriarchy.

Taiye Selasi

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

Taiye Selasi

#7. How can I come from a nation? How can a human being come from a concept?

Taiye Selasi

#8. Your baby is crying, says the driver to Taiwo, the Ghanian way of saying your cell phone is ringing.

Taiye Selasi

#9. 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.

Taiye Selasi

#10. The little corpse like a less lucky Moses all wrapped up in palm frond, in

Taiye Selasi

#11. As a novelist, I ask of myself only that I tell the truth and that I tell it beautifully.

Taiye Selasi

#12. Not sunflowers, not roses, but rocks in patterned sand grow here. And bloom. - ROBERT HAYDEN, Approximations

Taiye Selasi

#13. That's what makes writer's block so painful. You think the well has run dry, maybe somewhere in the heavens the tap has been turned off. That's beyond frightening.

Taiye Selasi

#14. 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.

Taiye Selasi

#15. 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.

Taiye Selasi

#16. 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.

Taiye Selasi

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

Taiye Selasi

#18. 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.

Taiye Selasi

#19. The reduction of anguish to Hallmark-card hurt. The

Taiye Selasi

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

Taiye Selasi

#21. 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.

Taiye Selasi

#22. 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!

Taiye Selasi

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

Taiye Selasi

#24. 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.

Taiye Selasi

#25. Sight is subjective. We learned that in class.

Taiye Selasi

#26. A word forgot to remember what to forget and every so often let the truth slip - RENEE C. NEBLETT, Snapshots

Taiye Selasi

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

Taiye Selasi

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

Taiye Selasi

#29. Loss is a notion. No more than a thought. Which one forms or one doesn't. With words. Such that one cannot lose, nor ever say he has lost, what he does not permit to exist in his mind.

Taiye Selasi

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

Taiye Selasi

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

Taiye Selasi

#32. 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.

Taiye Selasi

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

Taiye Selasi