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" Even in novels where the love relationship isn't the focus, I feel like it's often there, and the background is some barometer of whether this is a happy or sad story or whether this is a successful or unsuccessful life. "

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" The book that made me decide to go into Russian literature was 'Anna Karenina,' which I first read in high school. The thing that appealed to me and constituted its Russianness for me was that it was simultaneously incredibly funny and sad. "

Elif Batuman

Funny

Book

High School

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

" There's a lot to be said for an American-style liberal-arts education, which prevents young people from professionalizing right away. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I don't believe in being ashamed about not having read things. "

" Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time,' especially 'Time Regained,' made me think differently about what the novel is and can do. Then I forgot about it, then reread it and remembered again. "

" 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. "

" Russian literature got me interested in what literature means. "

Elif Batuman

Interested

Literature

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

" By the time I got to college, the Cold War was basically over. "

" It's so embarrassing and painful to be young. "

" When you started looking at the life of Tolstoy, there was so much passion and anger and drama surrounding him. "

" 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. "

" If, for a moment, it seemed that September 11th could be identified with Iraq, the illusion was short-lived. "

" My parents were educated in the Turkish system and went straight from high school to medical school; my mom, who had skipped a grade, was dissecting corpses at age seventeen. Growing up in America, I think I envied my parents' education. By comparison, everything I did in school seemed so sort of low-stakes and infantilizing. "

" Imagination is really dependent on memory and observation, these things that we think of as part of nonfiction writing, actually. "

" Being in a heterosexual relationship for a woman is always implicitly a little bit humiliating. "

" Listing and counting have a spooky, magical power, and the holiday season is a spooky, magical time. "

" The first time I held an African drum in my hands was at Koc University in a forest in the northern suburbs of Istanbul. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Everyone has a certain amount of bad writing to get out of their system. "

" 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. "

" I actually really wish I had written 'The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying' as an unreliably narrated novel that is also a self-help book. "

" You base your actions on a projected ending, which you actually don't know. However, when you reach the crucial point, and the pinnacle event doesn't occur, you just need to go on, and something else will happen. "

" 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. "

" Why is there an end of the year? Because the calendar imposes numerical order on time. There is a natural fitness in the celebration of the New Year, a holiday of numbers imposed on things, with lists, as well as with Advent calendars and songs like 'The Twelve Days of Christmas.' "

" The Himalayan glaciers, China's trade surplus, Olympic ice hockey - the world is full of pressing subjects that people never consult me about. "

Elif Batuman

World

Trade

" The novel is like a melancholy form. It's about some kind of disillusionment with the way things are versus the idea of how they could be or how they used to be. "

Elif Batuman

Kind

Some