Elif Batuman Quotes

I find something very appealing about taking literature very literally.

Elif Batuman

• Literature

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Quotes to Explore

• Intimate relationships are a gold mine for literature to explore, to understand, to describe.

  

  A. B. Yehoshua
  • Literature
  • Understand
  • Gold

• The Arab world also won the Nobel with me. I believe that international doors have opened, and that from now on, literate people will consider Arab literature also. We deserve that recognition.

  

  Naguib Mahfouz
  • People
  • World
  • Believe

• What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

  

  E. M. Forster
  • Great
  • Man
  • Literature

• Secret families are really the bedrock issue of Western literature.

  

  Tayari Jones
  • Literature
  • Secret
  • Western

• Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.

  

  D. H. Lawrence
  • Deep
  • Literature
  • Curse

• When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen. But if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any way you can.

  

  Samuel Lover
  • Man
  • Literature
  • Pen

• I had no student friends to talk to about literature. My tutor was a really nice man, very charming - but he had no literary judgment.

  

  V. S. Naipaul
  • Friends
  • Man
  • Nice

• Although by 1851 tales of adventure had begun to seem antiquated, they had rendered a large service to the course of literature: they had removed the stigma, for the most part, from the word novel.

  

  Carl Clinton Van Doren
  • Service
  • Literature
  • Adventure

• The world of fiction is a sovereign world that comes to life in the author's head and follows the rules of art, of literature. And that is the major difference that is reflected in the form of the work, in its language and its plot. An author invents every aspect of a fiction, every detail.

  

  Imre Kertesz
  • Life
  • World
  • Work

• I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.

  

  E. B. White
  • Know
  • Literature
  • More

• 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.

  

  Harrison Salisbury
  • Language
  • Literature
  • Economics

• Literature is memory written down. All literature is memory.

  

  Wayne Grady
  • Literature
  • Memory
  • Down

• Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next?

  

  Karen Thompson Walker
  • Life
  • Great
  • Important

• So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama, learning the literature on evolution, what was known about it biologically, just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular, scientific view of the world.

  

  E. O. Wilson
  • World
  • Learning
  • Literature

• Chinatown is tremendously interesting... It's a part of the city that hasn't really been explored in crime literature or in any general literature. It's as though Chinatown didn't exist. People write about New York without mentioning Chinatown at all.

  

  S. J. Rozan
  • People
  • Interesting
  • City

• The proverbial philosophy of a people helps us to understand more about them than any other kind of literature.

  

  Lafcadio Hearn
  • People
  • Kind
  • Literature

• The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives.

  

  W. G. Sebald
  • Mind
  • Happy
  • Question

• Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.

  

  F. Sionil Jose
  • People
  • Past
  • Literature

• The land of literature is a fairy land to those who view it at a distance, but, like all other landscapes, the charm fades on a nearer approach, and the thorns and briars become visible.

  

  Washington Irving
  • Literature
  • Distance
  • View

• I think of science fiction as being part of the great river of imaginative fiction that has flowed through English literature, probably for 400 or 500 years, well predating modern science.

  

  J. G. Ballard
  • Great
  • Science
  • English

• Volition . . . takes place only when there are a number of conflicting systems of ideas, and depends on our having a complex field of consciousness.

  

  William James
  • Literature
  • Philosophy
  • Consciousness

• Piglet opened the letter box and climbed in. Then, having untied himself, he began to squeeze into the slit, through which in the old days when front doors were front doors, many an unexpected letter than WOL had written to himself, had come slipping.

  

  A. A. Milne
  • Doors
  • Letters
  • Piglet

• On many questions and specially in view of the marriage bed, the Puritans were the indulgent party, . . . they were much more Chestertonian than their adversaries. The idea that a Puritan was a repressed and repressive person would have astonished Sir Thomas More and Luther about equally.

  

  C. S. Lewis
  • Party
  • Ideas
  • Marriage

• I find something very appealing about taking literature very literally.

  

  Elif Batuman
  • Literature