“I thought maybe Against Nature would be a book about someone who viewed things the way I did - someone trying to… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
I actually really wish I had written 'The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying' as an unreliably narrated novel that is also a self-help… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
I am a great admirer of Henry Jeffreys and have been eagerly awaiting his booze and empire book for many years! — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
As a grad student and later as a writer, I have found it hard to sustain the pure, almost erotic love of… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
If you're writing a book where you want to make a positive truth claim, then you should absolutely call it nonfiction or… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
When you're reading a novel, I think the reason you care about how any given plot turns out is that you take… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
The novel form is about the protagonist's struggle to transform his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as his… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
Nom de Plume uses the device of the pseudonym to unite the likes of Charlotte Bronte, Mark Twain, Fernando Pessoa, and Patricia… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
In the last volume of In Search of Lost Time, Proust compares himself to Scheherazade: he says he has finally understood the… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
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… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
“I leafed through the phrase book. If a Martian read it, the Martian would probably decide to avoid Hungary.” — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
You can't invent something you have no epistemological access to. In a way, it's all recombination. — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
Poetry is another space, like love, where we extend that extra credit to the writer. — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
“Svetlana said that she identified with that Madonna more than with any other woman in any other painting. She kept asking me what painting… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
One of the most painful parts of a breakup is having the feeling that your life is a story, and then the other person… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
“Dracula visited the Wolf Department at the Zoological Gardens. "These wolves seem upset at something," he observed. The next morning the cage was all… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
I like to think that I know a lot of words, but I definitely don't know all of them. — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
“I don't know if I ended up siding with the academics just because I happened to end up in graduate school, or if I… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
People don't become writers because they love having spontaneous, real-world interactions with living people as bodies with clothes in time. — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
“Each work of criticism is supposed to build on the body of work, to increase the total sum of human understanding. It's not like… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
Humor is really important to me. All my favorite writers are writers I consider to be funny, including Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, even though that's… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
