A Quote by Teju Cole
Barack Obama is an elegant and literate man with a cosmopolitan sense of the world. He is widely read in philosophy, literature, and history - as befits a former law professor - and he has shown time and again a surprising interest in contemporary fiction.
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There's a misconception about Barack Obama as a former constitutional law professor. First of all, there are plenty of professors who are 'legal relativists.' They tend to view legal principles as relative to whatever they're trying to achieve.
People like to complain about the state of contemporary literature, but I can only assume they don't read it very widely.
Barack Obama is the most Jewish president we've ever had (except for Rutherford B. Hayes). No president, not even Bill Clinton, has traveled so widely in Jewish circles, been taught by so many Jewish law professors, and had so many Jewish mentors, colleagues, and friends, and advisers as Barack Obama.
The irony is that [Barack] Obama was a law professor at the University of Chicago. He would, most of all, know that what he is doing weakens the Constitution.
Even if you only want to write science fiction, you should also read mysteries, poetry, mainstream literature, history, biography, philosophy, and science.
I've stopped reading fiction. I don't read it at all. I read other things: history, biography. I don't have the same interest in fiction that I once did.
Most of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important - about something going on in the history of the world - or contemporary.
Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. ...Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about.
Barack Obama is not Harry Truman, who dropped the A-bomb on Japan to stop World War II. Barack Obama is not John F. Kennedy, who lowered marginal tax rates to get economic growth and job creation. Barack Obama and the far left, they are a completely different ball of wax.
In high school I was drawn to the study of literature, poetry Shakespeare, contemporary fiction, drama, you name it - I read it.
If contemporary literary fiction doesn't read a bit like science fiction then it's probably not all that contemporary, is it
I read a couple of books a week. About 80 percent of what I read is contemporary literature for adults. The other 20 percent is made up of non-fiction and children's books.
Literature cannot develop between the categories "permitted"—"not permitted"—"this you can and that you can't." Literature that is not the air of its contemporary society, that dares not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers, such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a facade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as waste paper instead of being read. -Letter to the Fourth National Congress of Soviet Writers
The only people who live in a post-black world are four people who live in a little white house on Pennsylvania Avenue. The idea that America is post-racial or post-black because a man I admire, Barack Obama, is president of the United States, is a joke. And I hope no one will even wonder about this crazy fiction again.
All the eight years of [Barack] Obama when [George W.] Bush was asked repeatedly, "I don't do that. I had my time. It's his time now." The protocols and the history, the traditions say that past presidents don't comment. That didn't work for Bill Clinton. He couldn't help himself. Obama is not commenting, but Obama is actively engaged in the sabotage of the [Donald] Trump administration, with all of these community organizing uprisings.
You’re probably wasting time on things like eating and sleeping. Cease that, and read all of philosophy and all of literature. Also art. Plus politics and a few other things. The history of everything.
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