Elif Batuman Quotes
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My parents were born into a secular country. They met in Turkey's top medical school, moved to America in the nineteen-seventies, and became researchers and professors.
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If you are in a breakup, you might as well go all the way and spend the summer in Samarkand, with no air-conditioning, learning a language you have no use for. At least it adds some romance to a depressing situation.
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I think it is true that when we're older, we realize the way that people act is... you know, everyone's kind of talking off the cuff, and everyone's, you know, spitballing sometimes.
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I don't believe in being ashamed about not having read things.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It's so embarrassing and painful to be young.
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Most Americans have probably heard the song 'Santa Claus Is Coming to Town' about a billion times in the supermarket alone.
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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.'
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If, for a moment, it seemed that September 11th could be identified with Iraq, the illusion was short-lived.
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You can't invent something you have no epistemological access to. In a way, it's all recombination.
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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.
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There are very few things that I have any patience for that are not at least a little bit humorous.
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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.
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One of the stories that really impressed me was 'Anna Karenina.' As a novel, that made an impression on me, showing me what the novel can do.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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I always wanted to write novels, even before I had read a lot of novels or had a very good idea of what they were.
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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.
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Read enough about the dung beetle, and a picture of its character emerges: patient, optimistic, uncomplaining.