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" 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. "

Elif Batuman

Think

Know

People

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

" I always wanted to write novels, even before I had read a lot of novels or had a very good idea of what they were. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

" 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

" 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? "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Most Americans have probably heard the song 'Santa Claus Is Coming to Town' about a billion times in the supermarket alone. "

" 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. "

" 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

" There's this idea that if you want to write, you shouldn't study literature because then you're dissecting what you love, and you should keep your love of literature pure. I think that's kind of silly. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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