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" As a novelist, you write about social mores, but not everything can be explained. "
Elif Batuman
Social
Write
You
Related Quotes:
" I do think of 'The Idiot,' in a way, as a self-standing book about a certain struggle to make meaning, the struggle for a girl to find meaning outside of the romance plot. "
Elif Batuman
Think
Book
Struggle
" No time you spend writing will be wasted - even if you write something that's bad. "
Elif Batuman
Will
You
Time
" At the beginning of 'A Christmas Carol,' Scrooge embodies one of the central tenets of depression: that one has always been this way - and always will be. "
Elif Batuman
Christmas
Always
Beginning
" 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 and professors. "
Elif Batuman
Medical
America
Born
" The one text that most changed my opinion on criticism was probably Freud's 'Interpretation of Dreams,' which I read in college. "
Elif Batuman
Dreams
Criticism
Opinion
" The problems in the Russian novel are quite similar to the problems of Turkish nationalism and Turkish culture, which was something that I grew up thinking didn't affect me very much because my parents didn't really talk about it. "
Elif Batuman
Problems
Parents
Thinking
" For much of my adult life, I believed, inaccurately, that I knew the story of Charles Dickens's 'A Christmas Carol' - that I remembered it from childhood. "
Elif Batuman
Childhood
Adult
Christmas
" When I read that nobody should ever feel ashamed to be alone or to be in a crowd, I realized that I often felt ashamed of both of those things. "
Elif Batuman
Feel
Alone
Ashamed
" Soccer is taken extremely seriously in Turkey. "
Elif Batuman
Turkey
Soccer
Seriously
" I like a novel to have a certain amount of dead time and filler - unremarkable scenery, descriptions of getting from point A to point B, dialogue in which not much is said - in between the parts that are electric. With a long work that you don't read in one sitting, I think that makes for the best reading experience. "
Elif Batuman
Experience
Work
Best
" I find something very appealing about taking literature very literally. "
Elif Batuman
Very
Find
Something
" The dominant question for us with regard to literature has become, 'What does this have to do with me, with life as I know it?' That's the question answered by all these books about how Proust was actually a neuroscientist or how Proust can teach you emotional intelligence. "
Elif Batuman
Me
Life
Know
" The first thing I tried to write was a novel, when I took that time off in grad school. Then I didn't finish it. I went back to school, and then I started writing nonfiction kind of by accident. "
Elif Batuman
Time
Writing
Back
" Russian literature got me interested in what literature means. "
Elif Batuman
Interested
Literature
Me
" I've developed this love of trashy Russian literature. There's a women's detective series that I was obsessed with for a while, written by Aleksandra Marinina, the former chief of police. "
Elif Batuman
Former
Women
Love
" My family is very feminist, and they consider that Islam is not a super feminist religion, which I know people can argue about. But that's - anyway that's how I was brought up, so it would be odd for me to suddenly just up and start wearing a headscarf. "
Elif Batuman
Me
Family
Religion
" I have always known my mother as an agnostic, less certain than my father that the universe hadn't been created by some great intelligence. But she would get even more annoyed than my father did when she thought that people were invoking God to do their jobs for them - for example, when she saw a bus with a sticker saying 'Allah Protect Us.' "
Elif Batuman
Intelligence
Father
God
" Awkwardness is the consciousness of a false position. "
Elif Batuman
Position
Consciousness
False
" Anyone who has ever tried to plot a detective mystery knows that the hardest thing to come up with is motive. "
Elif Batuman
Hardest
Mystery
Plot
" There is this way that I felt when I was younger that we were beyond history and we were all citizens of the world that now seems so naive. "
Elif Batuman
History
Naive
Beyond
" Every time a meteor comes close to the earth, we all think about the end of the world - but our internal soundtrack doesn't turn off. We're also thinking about pizza or passing a slow tractor or making a turn, and for a magical instant, our lives seem to be in conversation with the stars. "
Elif Batuman
End
Think
Thinking
" I enjoy a good meal as much as anyone, but I get so confused by nutritional, budgetary, ecological, ethical, aesthetic, and time-management concerns that I often subsist for weeks on instant oatmeal and multivitamins. "
Elif Batuman
Enjoy
Aesthetic
Confused
" When you started looking at the life of Tolstoy, there was so much passion and anger and drama surrounding him. "
Elif Batuman
You
Anger
Looking
" Much as there are things about our own life stories that we can learn only from the systematic study of our dreams, there are things about the human condition that we can learn only from a systematic study of literature. "
Elif Batuman
Literature
Dreams
Learn
" Tolstoy didn't know about steampunk or cyborgs, but he did know about the nightmarishness of steam power, unruly machines, and the creepy half-human status of the Russian peasant classes. In 'Anna Karenina,' nineteenth-century life itself is a relentless, relentlessly modern machine, flattening those who oppose it. "
Elif Batuman
Life
Power
Relentless
" If you are in a breakup, you might as well go all the way and spend the summer in Samarkand, with no air-conditioning, learning a language you have no use for. At least it adds some romance to a depressing situation. "
Elif Batuman
Learning
You
Situation
" Imagination is really dependent on memory and observation, these things that we think of as part of nonfiction writing, actually. "
Elif Batuman
Memory
Imagination
Writing
" Everyone has a certain amount of bad writing to get out of their system. "
Elif Batuman
Writing
Everyone
Get
" I'm Turkish-American; I was a freshman at Harvard in 1995 and 96. I did teach English in Hungary in the summer of 1996. I'm an autobiographical writer in the sense that whether in fiction or nonfiction, the issues and relationships and phenomena and problems I'm most interested in exploring are the ones I've experienced personally. "
Elif Batuman
Summer
Relationships
Problems
" It's possible to watch 'Gone Girl' and feel that you have seen something terribly bleak. But it's also possible to receive it as good news. Any powerful articulation of the need for change is also a testimony to the possibility of change. "
Elif Batuman
Feel
You
Powerful