Elif Batuman Quotes

My family is very feminist, and they consider that Islam is not a super feminist religion, which I know people can argue about. But that's - anyway that's how I was brought up, so it would be odd for me to suddenly just up and start wearing a headscarf.

Elif Batuman

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• I joined the Army at 19 as a soldier and spent about four and a half years with them. Then I broke my back in a freefall parachuting accident and spent a year in rehabilitation back in the U.K.

  

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• I love the immediacy of an audience being there and reacting. I'm spoiled, having grown up in theater.

  

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• Mostly people are ignorant, what is the language of painting. You know, they're ignorant. It is so difficult to make them aware, but time will teach them.

  

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• I made my parents crazy. As a kid, I redecorated my bedroom every month. I would literally save my allowance and go buy things.

  

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• I am going to change the world, and I'm talking to everybody in the possible world that I can get to that can help me to do that.

  

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• I get a lot of influence from pro wrestling. People are like, 'Oh, it's fake.' But it's not about whether the guy wins or loses, it's about how he entertains you the whole time you're watching.

  

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• I generally avoid temptation unless I can't resist it.

  

  Mae West
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• Honestly, I'd love to say I live this amazing Hollywood lifestyle, but actually, I'm at home with my same friends and cooking. I crochet, I do watercolor. I think what surprised me the most is that that isn't the lifestyle everyone necessarily lives.

  

  Yael Grobglas
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• Few things parallel the bonding that occurs post-performance when congratulatory remarks are awarded, regrets are confessed, and gossip is exchanged.

  

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• I love acting. I've been doing it since I was 16, and it's in my nature. It's the thing I do best. But as much as I love acting, I love cinema more. I always had a thing about creating images.

  

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• Music is pretty intimate stuff and I can only work with very few people: Gonzalez being one, Mocky being another and, on a completely different level, Broken Social Scene. With Broken Social Scene it's not one-on-one, it's a one-on-12. It's very healthy, very comfortable, like a big pot luck supper among old friends.

  

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• I don't have anything interesting to conceal or reveal in my private life, and it is really only my work and professional life that I want to talk about.

  

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• Constrained circumstances can bring the best out of you.

  

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• I'm an emotional person.

  

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• Only as an individual can man become a philosopher.

  

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• I grew up in an era of pretty severe poverty. My parents weathered the Great Depression, and money was always a very big concern. I was weaned on a shortage mentality and placed in foster homes largely because there simply wasn't enough money to take care of the most basic of needs.

  

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• I was a fashion editor for years in London before I came to 'Vogue,' and I spent my life arranging the folds of a ball gown skirt for a picture and pinning fabric and using all those stylist tricks. And you don't have to do that now because they can do it in Photoshop.

  

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• The corporate right fires up the religious right against gay marriage and abortion and uses their votes to push their deregulation and tax cuts for the rich. It's an old trick. The House of Saud has the same arrangement with the Mullahs in Saudi Arabia.

  

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• My father's record collection was full of New Orleans music of all kinds. I used to listen to the radio in New York, and all there was on it at the time was Madonna and Michael Jackson, so it sort of passed me by.

  

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• I never had a girlLooking any better than you didAnd all the kids at schoolThey were wishing they were me that night.

  

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• My mother was born in Burma, but my grandfather on her side was Indian-Spanish. So I have this quite exotic mix, which is reflected in my earliest memories, in our Wiltshire country kitchen, of gran, and aunts, cooking spicy stewy, casseroley curries, a version of Indian food with a Burmese twist.

  

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• I never wanted for anything. We went to Ireland for holidays every year. I was 14 when we first went to Italy. My mum was determined I was going to go to a good school. My mum was an absolute grafter. A real grafter. I got my work ethic from her.

  

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• Lots of middle class people are running around pretending to be Cockney.

  

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• My family is very feminist, and they consider that Islam is not a super feminist religion, which I know people can argue about. But that's - anyway that's how I was brought up, so it would be odd for me to suddenly just up and start wearing a headscarf.

  

  Elif Batuman
  • People
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  • Family