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" I had wanted to write 'The Possessed' as fiction, but everyone told me that no one would read a novel about graduate students. It seems almost uncivilized to tell someone writing a novel, 'No, you have to call this a memoir.' "

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" My family is not only not religious, but my parents are both - they're secularists. My father is actually an atheist and feels very strongly about it. "

Elif Batuman

Family

Atheist

Parents

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

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

" 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.' "

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

" 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. "

" No time you spend writing will be wasted - even if you write something that's bad. "

" Soccer is taken extremely seriously in Turkey. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I think it is true that when we're older, we realize the way that people act is... you know, everyone's kind of talking off the cuff, and everyone's, you know, spitballing sometimes. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" There are very few things that I have any patience for that are not at least a little bit humorous. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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 find something very appealing about taking literature very literally. "

" 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

" I love the novelist's freedom of going into different people's subjectivity and being able to work with them as characters. "

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

" I grew up thinking that it was immoral to idealize the past because, in the past, there was slavery and no penicillin. "

Elif Batuman

In The Past

Thinking

" The first modern novel was already a product, even an expression, of negative criticism: 'Don Quixote' contains a quite explicit critique of the chivalric romance and its insufficiency to account for the way real life feels when you get up in the morning in 17th-century Spain. "

" It's important not to censor yourself and not to get upset or demoralized when you write bad stuff. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "