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
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
“For a moment it felt like we weren’t in the Danube at all but in the river of time, and everyone was… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
Now that I'm almost forty, I look back at some of the decisions I made when I was younger - decisions that… — 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
“The Other,” I repeated, to buy time. I was pretty sure that the Other was a French construct having something to do… — 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
“A few times I saw a chicken walking around importantly, like some kind of a regional manager.” — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
If, for a moment, it seemed that September 11th could be identified with Iraq, the illusion was short-lived. — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
“I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time--the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
“What does literature do better than anything else? It provides a detailed representation of the inner experience of being alive in a… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
Listing and counting have a spooky, magical power, and the holiday season is a spooky, magical time. — 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
No time you spend writing will be wasted - even if you write something that's bad. — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
“The first time I read Isaac Babel was in a college creative writing class. The instructor was a sympathetic Jewish novelist with… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
Why is there an end of the year? Because the calendar imposes numerical order on time. There is a natural fitness in… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
In a way all writers are writing against death, because writing is an attempt to defy the passage of time, to refuse… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
At any given time, there are ideas and images that can only be communicated indirectly. — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
The first thing I tried to write was a novel, when I took that time off in grad school. Then I didn't… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
“Light from even a nearby star was four years old by the time it reached your eyes. Where would I be in… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
The first time I held an African drum in my hands was at Koc University in a forest in the northern suburbs… — 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
There are ideas it will be easy to say in the future that we just don't have the language for now. — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time,' especially 'Time Regained,' made me think differently about what the novel is and can do. Then… — 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
