Elif Batuman

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

“I leafed through the phrase book. If a Martian read it, the Martian would probably decide to avoid Hungary.”

— Elif Batuman

You can't invent something you have no epistemological access to. In a way, it's all recombination.

— Elif Batuman

Poetry is another space, like love, where we extend that extra credit to the writer.

— Elif Batuman

“Svetlana said that she identified with that Madonna more than with any other woman in any other painting. She kept asking me…

— Elif Batuman

One of the most painful parts of a breakup is having the feeling that your life is a story, and then the…

— Elif Batuman

“Dracula visited the Wolf Department at the Zoological Gardens. "These wolves seem upset at something," he observed. The next morning the cage…

— Elif Batuman

I like to think that I know a lot of words, but I definitely don't know all of them.

— Elif Batuman

“I don't know if I ended up siding with the academics just because I happened to end up in graduate school, or…

— Elif Batuman

People don't become writers because they love having spontaneous, real-world interactions with living people as bodies with clothes in time.

— Elif Batuman

“Each work of criticism is supposed to build on the body of work, to increase the total sum of human understanding. It's…

— Elif Batuman

Humor is really important to me. All my favorite writers are writers I consider to be funny, including Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, even…

— Elif Batuman

Every time a meteor comes close to the earth, we all think about the end of the world - but our internal…

— Elif Batuman

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

“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

“They didn't take anything I did seriously; it was all some trivial, mildly annoying side activity that I insisted on for some…

— Elif Batuman

“Most people, the minute they meet you, were sizing you up for some competition for resources. It was as if everyone lived…

— Elif Batuman

To think of Tolstoy eating a sandwich is intrinsically kind of funny.

— Elif Batuman

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

“Hungary felt increasingly like reading War and Peace: new characters came up every five minutes, with their unusual names and distinctive locutions,…

— Elif Batuman

My family is very feminist, and they consider that Islam is not a super feminist religion, which I know people can argue…

— Elif Batuman

Anyone who has ever tried to plot a detective mystery knows that the hardest thing to come up with is motive.

— Elif Batuman

When I read that nobody should ever feel ashamed to be alone or to be in a crowd, I realized that I…

— Elif Batuman

My family is not only not religious, but my parents are both - they're secularists. My father is actually an atheist and…

— Elif Batuman

People are shaped by friendship as much as by romance.

— Elif Batuman