When in doubt, it is better to do the less conservative thing and to err on the side of the more colorful,… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
I grew up thinking that it was immoral to idealize the past because, in the past, there was slavery and no penicillin. — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
I think it's true that, as is often observed, the writer is always an outsider. A writer is someone who is telling… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
If I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe,… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
The problems in the Russian novel are quite similar to the problems of Turkish nationalism and Turkish culture, which was something that… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
Reading Epictetus, I realized that most of the pain in my life came not from any actual privations or insults but, rather,… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
Every time a meteor comes close to the earth, we all think about the end of the world - but our internal… — 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
I think time just goes faster and faster. I'm saying this a few months away from my fortieth birthday. I don't know… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
I think any start has to be a false start because really there’s no way to start. You just have to force… — 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
If you think about Don Quixote, Don Quixote is this guy who wants to live as if he was in a medieval… — 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
I don't think anything can substitute long talks, and long talks are somehow never as easy to schedule again as they were… — 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
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
I think humor is a really important way of creating solidarity - like, through humor you can make people realize that certain… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
One of my favorite literary theorists, Mikhail Bakhtin, wrote that the defining characteristic of the novel is its unprecedented level of "heteroglossia"… — 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
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
