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
I love the novelist's freedom of going into different people's subjectivity and being able to work with them as characters. — 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
Love is a rare and valuable thing, and you don't get to choose its object. You just go around getting hung up… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
I've developed this love of trashy Russian literature. There's a women's detective series that I was obsessed with for a while, written… — 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
Even in novels where the love relationship isn't the focus, I feel like it's often there, and the background is some barometer… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
“When you think about all the infinitely many galaxies and combinations of DNA, and against all those odds you meet this person… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
I've been thinking a lot about why it was so important to me to do The Idiot as a novel, and not… — 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
“I don't know if I ended up siding with the academics just because I happened to end up in graduate school, or… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
“I had always been in love with someone. It was the only thing that made it feasible to live that way, getting… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
In a lot of ways, being a writer is a lousy job - grueling, emotionally taxing, terrible hours, no health care -… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
I try really hard to cultivate the pure love of reading, to make time for it, because it would be really sad… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
“I kept looking around the bleachers at the audience, middle-aged people in practical clothes. Every single one of them cared about love,… — 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
