To think of Tolstoy eating a sandwich is intrinsically kind of funny. — 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
When a novelist manages to describe or evoke something you thought or felt, without realizing that other people also found themselves in… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
One of the things that really impressed me about Anna Karenina when I first read it was how Tolstoy sets you up… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
The novel is like a melancholy form. It's about some kind of disillusionment with the way things are versus the idea of… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
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… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
I do like the idea of the novel of repressed college students being a contemporary novel of courtship! I guess what I… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
There is salvation - happiness and virtue - in beauty. I would define beauty in this context as a kind of richness,… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
Obviously there are many, many ways of being an outsider, but having immigrant parents is one of them. For one thing, it… — 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
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
