-
No time you spend writing will be wasted - even if you write something that's bad.
Elif Batuman -
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.
Elif Batuman
-
Many books have changed my life, but only one has the word 'life-changing' in the title: Marie Kondo's 'The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying.'
Elif Batuman -
Even in novels where the love relationship isn't the focus, I feel like it's often there, and the background is some barometer of whether this is a happy or sad story or whether this is a successful or unsuccessful life.
Elif Batuman -
Most Americans have probably heard the song 'Santa Claus Is Coming to Town' about a billion times in the supermarket alone.
Elif Batuman -
The one text that most changed my opinion on criticism was probably Freud's 'Interpretation of Dreams,' which I read in college.
Elif Batuman -
There's this idea that if you want to write, you shouldn't study literature because then you're dissecting what you love, and you should keep your love of literature pure. I think that's kind of silly.
Elif Batuman -
There is this way that I felt when I was younger that we were beyond history and we were all citizens of the world that now seems so naive.
Elif Batuman
-
I grew up thinking that it was immoral to idealize the past because, in the past, there was slavery and no penicillin.
Elif Batuman -
There are very few things that I have any patience for that are not at least a little bit humorous.
Elif Batuman -
I actually really wish I had written 'The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying' as an unreliably narrated novel that is also a self-help book.
Elif Batuman -
One of the most painful parts of a breakup is having the feeling that your life is a story, and then the other person leaves and takes the story with them. And you're left there without it. You're left in this version of life that's basically a succession of events and interactions that don't seem to be going anywhere.
Elif Batuman -
I grew up hearing that if it hadn't been for Ataturk, my grandmother would have been 'a covered person' who would have been reliant on a man for her livelihood. Instead, she went to boarding school, wrote a thesis on Balzac, and became a teacher.
Elif Batuman -
You can't invent something you have no epistemological access to. In a way, it's all recombination.
Elif Batuman
-
The book that made me decide to go into Russian literature was 'Anna Karenina,' which I first read in high school. The thing that appealed to me and constituted its Russianness for me was that it was simultaneously incredibly funny and sad.
Elif Batuman -
To think of Tolstoy eating a sandwich is intrinsically kind of funny.
Elif Batuman -
Anyone who has ever tried to plot a detective mystery knows that the hardest thing to come up with is motive.
Elif Batuman -
It's kind of an embarrassing story - that's why it's called 'The Idiot.' But looking back at your past self, you see that this person had reasons for everything she did. There's a whole lot of awkwardness, but really, what should one be embarrassed about?
Elif Batuman -
It's possible to watch 'Gone Girl' and feel that you have seen something terribly bleak. But it's also possible to receive it as good news. Any powerful articulation of the need for change is also a testimony to the possibility of change.
Elif Batuman -
I'm Turkish-American; I was a freshman at Harvard in 1995 and 96. I did teach English in Hungary in the summer of 1996. I'm an autobiographical writer in the sense that whether in fiction or nonfiction, the issues and relationships and phenomena and problems I'm most interested in exploring are the ones I've experienced personally.
Elif Batuman
-
Lists are based on realism - on the coldly contemplated finitude of resources.
Elif Batuman -
The first time I held an African drum in my hands was at Koc University in a forest in the northern suburbs of Istanbul.
Elif Batuman -
The novel is like a melancholy form. It's about some kind of disillusionment with the way things are versus the idea of how they could be or how they used to be.
Elif Batuman -
Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time,' especially 'Time Regained,' made me think differently about what the novel is and can do. Then I forgot about it, then reread it and remembered again.
Elif Batuman