Taiye Selasi Quotes

There's this long history of colonialism and the colonial gaze when applied to matters related to China. So a lot of conceptions about China in literary representations in the West are things you can't even fight against because they've been there so long that they've become part of the Western imagination of China.

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.

Everyone has seen photographs of Mexicans wearing those big sombreros. When you come to Mexico, the astonishing thing is, nobody wears these hats at all.

I'm so sick of people misunderstanding Asians in America and what we're about.

I feel like Africans are too often portrayed as people on the National Geographic channel: the image is of an African man in a loincloth chasing a gazelle. It's not intentionally racist; I wouldn't call it racist at all. It's a lack of understanding another culture.

Undeniably the American art form, too. And yet more and more, we see films made that diminish the American experience and example. And sometimes trash it completely.

A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.

Americans think African writers will write about the exotic, about wildlife, poverty, maybe AIDS. They come to Africa and African books with certain expectations.

Well, it's an adventure story, and a Bildungsroman, of course, but there was also the intention to describe a culture that had been seen in rather narrow terms.

It's really tough to be a Mexican on 'Breaking Bad.'

How is it that the country that invented Hollywood and Madison Avenue allowed such a destructive and parodied image of itself to become the intellectual coin of the realm overseas?

I grew up in an environment with virtually no Hispanics where you see only people in your culture in custodial jobs. I had a messed up image of what we bring to this nation. My father was known as a pioneering figure in Cuban music, but I still associated him with everything that was negative in my neighborhood. I could not have been more mistaken.

The American writer has his hands full, trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of American reality.

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

At least half the country thinks the mascot issue is insignificant. But I think it's indicative of the ways in which Indians have no cultural power. We're still placed in the past. So we're either in the past or we're only viewed through casinos.

making final judgements about poets, cities or regions on the basis of an anthology is always dangerous: anthologies are mirages created, finally, by their editors.

Continue reading Proust. His magnificent intelligence is particularly fond of describing stupidity. Which is ultimately exhausting.

I'd heard so many stupidities about my country since I left Iran. People had watched this stupid movie Not Without My Daughter [in which Sally Field plays an American who rescues her daughter from her estranged in-laws in Iran]; I heard so many things like that. I did not make Persepolis for Iranians. It was my answer to the rest of the world, to say, "Let me give you another point of view."

If you want to know a country, read its writers.

The point of the first one was that it was about guys being lured by sex and the stereotypes... I always say it's like a horror version of Borat. Borat's not an accurate depiction of Khazakstan, it's an accurate depiction of America. That's what Hostel is.

Frederick Buechner can find grace and redemption even in the shoddiest, phoniest aspects of a cultural wasteland. One reads Lion Country...with hope and delight.

It is perfectly delightful to take advantage of the conscientious labors of those who go through and through volume after volume, divide with infinite patience the gold from the dross, and present us with the pure and shining coin. Such men may be likened to bees who save us numberless journeys by giving us the fruit of their own.

Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race. As a bankrupt thief turns thief-taker in despair, so an unsuccessful author turns critic.

Jesmyn Ward is an alchemist. She transmutes pain and loss into gold. Men We Reaped illustrates hardships but thankfully, vitally, it's just as clear about the humor, the intelligence, the tenderness, the brilliance of the folks in DeLisle, Mississippi. A community that's usually wiped off the literary map can't be erased when it's in a book this good.

Eventually, I think cinematography for every culture is a way to explore different stories, different ways of also delivering a story.