Elif Batuman Quotes
I do think of 'The Idiot,' in a way, as a self-standing book about a certain struggle to make meaning, the struggle for a girl to find meaning outside of the romance plot.
Quotes to Explore
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Hands down, the biggest thrill is to get a letter from a kid saying, I loved your book. Will you write me another one?
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I've been a fortunate girl: I grew up in a family that loved me from day one. I feel well grounded and lucky from that. So everything else is a bonus, because I grew up in this family that I adored, and adored me, and I think when you have that, you are already ahead of the game in the sense of how you feel about yourself.
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A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
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If you meet a girl, you meet a girl. It's normal, so if you exchange numbers, whatevs, it's cool.
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I signed this girl's arm. And the next day, a family member shot me an email, and it was a link to this girl who had my signature tattooed on her arm. I was like, 'Man, that's dedication. I'm sorry you did that.'
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My generation of bossy, confident, baby-boom women were something brand new in history. Our energy and assertiveness weren't created by Betty Friedan, unknown before her 1963 book, or by Gloria Steinem, whose political activism, as even the Lifetime profile admitted, did not begin until 1969.
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I kind of just want to look like a cool French girl in the Sixties most of the time. Or TLC.
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To be honest, before I joined the industry, I knew very little about the fashion world, and I hardly knew any name brands. Probably because the price tags were a little too high, and home girl needed to work.
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Perhaps one of the most important things you can do for human beings is wean them off an animal-based diet. It hardens the arteries and runs up our health-care costs. The last thing a poor person can afford is a heart attack or cancer or a stroke. And that's all linked to a meat-based diet. I think animal liberation is human liberation.
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One half who graduate from college never read another book.
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I'm not going to break up my family, not for a book.
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We played 'Girl in a Country Song' in front of Scott Borchetta, and he loved it.
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I love C-3PO; I love the girl from 'Ex Machina' - these kind of robots that have so much soul that you feel for them.
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A book is a gift you can open again and again.
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Every little girl looks up to her mom so much - that's your first hero.
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We use the term 'fight' very lightly - 'I've been fighting so hard to get my car, I've been fighting so hard to get that job, I've been fighting so hard to get that girl.' But the reality is boxers do fight bitterly to get whatever they want or whatever they need in life, and most of them come from nothing, which is the case of Roberto Duran.
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I wasn't one of those kids who grew up wanting to write or who read a particular book and thought: 'I want to do that!' I always told stories and wrote them down, but I never thought writing was a career path, even though, clearly, someone was writing the books and newspapers and magazines.
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We did some research that showed that the very first word of your message that you send a girl - when we looked at men sending messages to women - the very first word can have a tremendous... can have a very accurate prediction of whether you're going to get a reply.
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I'm more of a jeans and T-shirt kind of girl.
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You cannot have the media so close to you that it becomes your voice. This is no good because it becomes too extreme, and people will resent it.
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You don't hurt 'em if you don't hit 'em.
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Trust is always a factor. You've just got to look at the big picture, and you've got to look at the small picture - the small picture in the sense that you've got to make every scene work and you've got to deal with what people are presenting you with, too.
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I do think of 'The Idiot,' in a way, as a self-standing book about a certain struggle to make meaning, the struggle for a girl to find meaning outside of the romance plot.
