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
Imagination is really dependent on memory and observation, these things that we think of as part of nonfiction writing, actually. — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
I actually really wish I had written 'The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying' as an unreliably narrated novel that is also a self-help… — 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
No time you spend writing will be wasted - even if you write something that's bad. — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
I always wanted to write novels, even before I had read a lot of novels or had a very good idea of… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
As a novelist, you write about social mores, but not everything can be explained. — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
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 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
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
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
From an early age, my favorite thing to read was novels. For years, when I was writing only nonfiction, still I was… — 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… — 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
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
If you're writing a book where you want to make a positive truth claim, then you should absolutely call it nonfiction or… — 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
I'm Turkish-American; I was a freshman at Harvard in 1995 and 96. I did teach English in Hungary in the summer of… — 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'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
“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
Everyone has a certain amount of bad writing to get out of their system. — 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
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
Actually, I've taught creative writing in Turkey, at an English language university, where the students were native Turkish speakers, but they were… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
I had wanted to write 'The Possessed' as fiction, but everyone told me that no one would read a novel about graduate… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
When you invent something, you're drawing on reservoirs of knowledge that you already have. It's only when you're faithful to the truth… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
“Even though I had a deep conviction that I was good at writing, and that in some way I already was a… — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
Writing fiction lets you be a little more emotional and unguarded, a little freer. Writing fictional characters is also really different from… — 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
In the last volume of In Search of Lost Time, Proust compares himself to Scheherazade: he says he has finally understood the… — 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
