Elif Batuman Quotes
There's this idea that if you want to write, you shouldn't study literature because then you're dissecting what you love, and you should keep your love of literature pure. I think that's kind of silly.
Quotes to Explore
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Study first, play afterwards.
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I had a major bug for cities and for paintings and literature and all the things I thought went on in cities.
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Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.
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After Brown, I went to Duke, to a Ph.D. program in American literature. My dad's an English professor. After a year there, I was like, 'Jesus. I don't want to do this. I don't want to be in the library.' So I pulled the ripcord, and that was it.
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When you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.
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It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race.
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Journalism students need to understand it and need a solid background in the liberal arts, in sociology, economics, literature and language, because they won't get it later on.
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Despite a certain amount of rhetoric, such as 'the second American Revolution,' there is a fair consensus about which events in the affairs of a people can rightly be called revolutions. It is also clear that such revolutions are proper objects of study for the historian.
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God invented mankind because he loved silly stories.
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When I first stepped into literature twenty-five years ago, I wanted to work on behalf of the oppressed, the working masses, and it seemed to me, mistakenly, that I would not find them among the Jews.
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Sometimes it is claimed by those who argue that race is just a social construct that the human genome project shows that because people share roughly 99% of their genes in common, that there are no races. This is silly.
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I fell even more deeply in love with Tolkien's legendarium after studying Old English literature at uni, as I got a sense of the historical events and cultures that Tolkien used to create his world. My favourite of his imaginary locations is Lothlorien.
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For me, having come to study and understand some of the Bible and finally getting saved made a huge difference in me, because my wife was a big influence on that. I saw in her, when I first met her, a person's soul at peace with everything and everybody around her.
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My friends and I often film videos when we get together and hang out, and they're usually just silly situational videos just for our own amusement.
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Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.
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If you want to understand Jesus, you have to study the whole Bible. Christian duty is not defined solely by the words in red.
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I have a study now - I used not to. I also love working in cafes; ignoring noise is good for concentration.
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To me, steampunk and urban fantasy are naturally hinged together. And I think that's because I love the early gothic Victorian literature, and both things spring from that movement.
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There's also a level of discipline I use as a writer, designed to get better at what I'm doing, that requires quite a lot of study and quite a lot of hard work as well.
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I'm very happy when I can find somewhere with some very good matzo ball soup, tasting exactly the same as the one my mother used to do for me.
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I decided I wanted to do something that was worthwhile and thought I would try architecture. There was not an architect in my family.
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I do worry about tomorrow's game, but never about next year's job.
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I think 'No' is a very powerful word in our business that is very hard to use early on in your career. But I also think I was pretty arrogant when I was younger... I used that word maybe too much, but it did help me with finding roles that I did like.
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There's this idea that if you want to write, you shouldn't study literature because then you're dissecting what you love, and you should keep your love of literature pure. I think that's kind of silly.
