Taiye Selasi Quotes

Because, as we know, almost anything can be read into any book if you are determined enough. This will be especially impressed on anyone who has written fantastic fiction. He will find reviewers, both favourable and hostile, reading into his stories all manner of allegorical meanings which he never intended. (Some of the allegories thus imposed on my own books have been so ingenious and interesting that I often wish I had thought of them myself.)

I am fine with my books being categorized as African-American literature but I hope they are also considered Haitian-American literature and American literature. All of these things are part of who I am and what I write.

I don't like to be described as a Southern writer. The danger is, if you're described as a Southern writer, you might be thought of as someone who writes about a picturesque local scene like Uncle Tom's Cabin, Gone With the Wind, something like that.

There is a technical term for someone who confuses the opinions of a character in a book with those of the author. That term is idiot.

My wife read Narc as well and was really into it.

With the first novel, I was concerned I would be pigeon-holed as an Asian-American writer, and the book would be labeled for Asian-Americans only.

Trying to project our expectations and our desires onto the sci-fi being written in China now isn't terribly helpful.

Labels like 'Chinese Science Fiction' or 'Western Science Fiction' summarize a vast field of work, all of which are diverse and driven by individual authors, with individual concerns.

Most critics don't realize that a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude is a bit of a joke, full of signals to close friends; and so, with some pre-ordained right to pontificate they take on the responsibility of decoding the book and risk making terrible fools of themselves.

No book, however good, can survive a hostile reading.

It is quite too common a practice, both in readers and the more superficial class of critics, to judge a book by what it is not, a matter much easier to determine than what it is.

In the past few years I've assigned books to be read before a student attends one of my weeklong seminars. I have been astonished by how few people -- people who supposedly want to write -- read books, and if they read them, how little they examine them.

Some read for style, and some for argument: one has little care about the sentiment, he observes only how it is expressed; another regards not the conclusion, but is diligent to mark how it is inferred; they read for other purposes than the attainment of practical knowledge; and are no more likely to grow wise by an examination of a treatise of moral prudence, than an architect to inflame his devotion by considering attentively the proportions of a temple.

In the main, there are two sorts of books: those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read.

If you would understand your own age, read the works of fiction produced in it. People in disguise speak freely.

I think I write what's interesting to me, and so if I'm reading I like to have a very thorough idea of a character in a book that's by someone else.

I think that good writing is based on good reading. Maybe it's not about writing today, maybe it's about reading today. Maybe it's about finding the sort of book you would never read.

We are now in want of an art to teach how books are to be read rather than to read them. Such an art is practicable.

In Africa, when you pick up a book worth reading, out of the deadly consignments which good ships are always being made to carry out all the way from Europe, you read it as an author would like his book to be read, praying to God that he may have it in him to go on as beautifully as he has begun. Your mind runs, transported, upon a fresh deep green track.

Becoming a writer can kind of spoil your reading because you kind of read on tracks. You're reading as someone who wants to enjoy the book but also, as a writer, noticing the techniques that the writer uses and especially the ones that make you want to turn the page to see what happened.

Twenty years ago, when I started writing, I didn't define myself as an African-American writer. And then you write books and you're focused on what's inside your books, and that kind of term is generally used on the outside, by the critical establishment.

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking.

You can recognize in your own reading habits what writers are doing that works and what doesn't. I'm becoming much more aware of that after reading a decade of student stories.

It is no more expected of most producers to read a book than it is, say, of Ted Williams to dust off home plate.

I never read a novel, they have so little real life and thought in them.