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" 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

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

" Reading Epictetus, I realized that most of the pain in my life came not from any actual privations or insults but, rather, from the shame of thinking that they could have been avoided. "

" Awkwardness is the consciousness of a false position. "

" 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. "

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

" 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

Life

Know

" Lists are based on realism - on the coldly contemplated finitude of resources. "

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

" 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. "

" When in doubt, it is better to do the less conservative thing and to err on the side of the more colorful, possibly terrible mistake. That comes from thinking of yourself as a writer. "

" One of the stories that really impressed me was 'Anna Karenina.' As a novel, that made an impression on me, showing me what the novel can do. "

Elif Batuman

Made

Stories

" Awkwardness comes from the realization that, when you look around the world, it's difficult to identify anyone who isn't either the victim or the beneficiary of injustice. "

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

Elif Batuman

Interested

Literature

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When you walk around, you have all this stuff rattling around in your head, things that have happened to you, things you have read. Life is just life, and you get what you get out of it. "

" 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. "

" A lot of what I write is very personal. "

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

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

" As a novelist, you write about social mores, but not everything can be explained. "

" 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. "

" It's kind of an embarrassing story - that's why it's called 'The Idiot.' But looking back at your past self, you see that this person had reasons for everything she did. There's a whole lot of awkwardness, but really, what should one be embarrassed about? "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" The one text that most changed my opinion on criticism was probably Freud's 'Interpretation of Dreams,' which I read in college. "

" 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

" Actually, I've taught creative writing in Turkey, at an English language university, where the students were native Turkish speakers, but they were writing their essays in English, and they were very interesting - even the sense of structure, the conventions of writing, the different styles of writing. "

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

" One of the most painful parts of a breakup is having the feeling that your life is a story, and then the other person leaves and takes the story with them. And you're left there without it. You're left in this version of life that's basically a succession of events and interactions that don't seem to be going anywhere. "