Quote by 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 became researchers…

— 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 what painting…

— Elif Batuman

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

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 if I…

— 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 not like…

— Elif Batuman

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

Every time a meteor comes close to the earth, we all think about the end of the world - but our internal soundtrack doesn't…

— Elif Batuman