My parents were born into a secular country. They met in Turkey's top medical school, moved to America in the nineteen-seventies, and… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
I felt grateful to Ataturk that my parents were so well educated, that they weren't held back by superstition or religion, that… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
My family is not only not religious, but my parents are both - they're secularists. My father is actually an atheist and… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
“I understood that the rest of my life would consist of causing Ivan to lug that suitcase in and out of his… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
I have always known my mother as an agnostic, less certain than my father that the universe hadn't been created by some… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
My parents were educated in the Turkish system and went straight from high school to medical school; my mom, who had skipped… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
Even when I was very small, my mother treated me like a great novelist. She was like: 'Oh, I'm sitting at the… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
Everyone is used to speaking a slightly different "language" with their parents than with their peers, because spoken language changes every generation… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
“In my heart, I knew that Whorf was right. I knew I thought differently in Turkish and English - not because thought… — 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
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
