You can't invent something you have no epistemological access to. In a way, it's all recombination. — 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 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
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
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
There is this way that I felt when I was younger that we were beyond history and we were all citizens of… — 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
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
I think it is true that when we're older, we realize the way that people act is... you know, everyone's kind of… — 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 thought clarity of communication was the most important thing in writing, and if you really cared about getting your idea across,… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
At the beginning of 'A Christmas Carol,' Scrooge embodies one of the central tenets of depression: that one has always been this… — 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
