Elif Batuman Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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Intimate relationships are a gold mine for literature to explore, to understand, to describe.
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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.
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What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
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Secret families are really the bedrock issue of Western literature.
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Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.
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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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Literature is memory written down. All literature is memory.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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The proverbial philosophy of a people helps us to understand more about them than any other kind of literature.
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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.
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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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This is the harsh truth about us: not only do Filipinos ignore books, literature - we do not understand how important the arts are - not just to those of us who work at it, but to the nation as a whole.
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It takes half your life before you discover life is a do-it-yourself project.
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You'll get a kid in Liberia wearing a Tupac T-shirt, and for us, that's zef. People try to say it's like trash, but it's not really trash. It's putting things together you think are cool.
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I'm into sincerity in music and sincerity in art. If it doesn't feel true, I don't want to do it. Things that are too dramatic scare me. I think that's why I don't always fit into the world of performing arts.
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I find something very appealing about taking literature very literally.
