Elif Batuman Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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I've had a pretty charmed life, so there's nothing that I need to take too seriously right now.
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When companies get big, they slow down. They're not as exciting. If you want to get something done, it takes a lot of time and a lot of meetings.
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They don't call it the Internet anymore, they call it cloud computing. I'm no longer resisting the name. Call it what you want.
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I propose a Constitutional Amendment providing that, if any public official, elected or appointed, at any level of government, is caught lying to any member of the public for any reason, the punishment shall be death by public hanging.
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Novelty is always welcome but talking pictures are just a fad.
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I have written a lot about the fine arts, but I'd never written about the literary arts, and so on some level Dante really, you know, spoke to me, as new ground but also familiar ground.
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Finishing games has been something I'm really proud of, seeing something through to the end.
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If I don't write down a thought - or an image or a line of poetry - the instant it comes to mind, it vanishes, which explains why I have pens and notebooks in my pants and coat pockets, the car, the bicycle basket, on one or two desks in every room including bathrooms and the kitchen.
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Cartooning was a good fit for me. And yet now, years later, I almost never think about it.
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If the 'Post' can play the role of a connector between the West and the East, I have confidence in the paper's future success.
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Waiting for me in Stockholm will be a personal assistant - Katrina from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs - as well the secretary of the Swedish Academy. They'll help us with our things and take us to our hotel. From the moment I arrive, I'll always be together with the other two laureates.
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If you live through the initial stage of fame and get past it, and remember thats not who you are. If you live past that, then you have a hope of maybe learning how to spell the word artist.
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Being a role model is about being true to myself.
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The lives of African-Americans in this country are characterized by violence for most of our history. Much of that violence, at least to some extent, you know, done by the very state that's supposed to protect them.
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The hardest thing about being an unpublished writer is that there's always that voice in your head that asks if you're really being a fool. You might just really stink and not know it. You have to have a lot of blind faith in the process. You have to like it so much that you're going to do it anyway.
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I loved Judy Garland. I thought she was such a classic beauty. I thought she was so endearing and charming, and I loved her voice. She was such a dreamer, and I think I was, too - and I am.
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I think it's possible to be multi-rooted, rather like a banyan tree, without being deracinated.
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It seems astonishing to be paid for indulging in pure pleasure. For me to go to Coburg is rather as if a trainspotter was sent for a few weeks to Swindon or a chocoholic asked on holiday by Green and Black.
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I thought it was great being the only girl in the room. I loved the attention. After I got used to it, I didn't want to be the only girl in the room. I had no one to talk to.
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I realise that in this undertaking I place myself in a certain opposition to views widely held concerning the mathematical infinite and to opinions frequently defended on the nature of numbers.
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We walked to the brink and we looked it in the face.
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Strangely enough, among my dad's things, I found the diary of an ancestor who was born in 1797 and became a ventriloquist in London. That was quite chilling. It described exactly how I was as a child but 150 years earlier - doing voices, pretending to be a ventriloquist.
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My biggest problem with organized religion is that God has been imagined as a human being with emotions. I feel if you let go of that, then it's possible to see God as a force, to connect to him or her spiritually.
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No time you spend writing will be wasted - even if you write something that's bad.
