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

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

" Even when I was very small, my mother treated me like a great novelist. She was like: 'Oh, I'm sitting at the breakfast table with Flaubert,' and would say, if she burned some food or was late arriving, 'Don't put this in your novel!' "

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

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

" From an early age, my favorite thing to read was novels. For years, when I was writing only nonfiction, still I was reading almost exclusively novels. It's weird to be producing something that you don't consume. It feels really alienating. "

" Many books have changed my life, but only one has the word 'life-changing' in the title: Marie Kondo's 'The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying.' "

" I felt grateful to Ataturk that my parents were so well educated, that they weren't held back by superstition or religion, that they were true scientists who taught me how to read when I was three and never doubted that I could become a writer. "

" 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. "

" When I was growing up, many of my relatives had never seen a black person before. Today, hundreds, maybe thousands of Africans live in Istanbul's old city alone. It's hard to imagine their lives in their human totality. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" For a Nabokov fan, paging through 'Fine Lines,' which includes a critical introduction and several essayistic evaluations of Nabokov's scientific oeuvre, can feel a bit like reading the second half of 'Pale Fire': one is confronted by a content-rich, almost dementedly tangential commentary on an increasingly inscrutable work. "

" 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. "

" I grew up hearing that if it hadn't been for Ataturk, my grandmother would have been 'a covered person' who would have been reliant on a man for her livelihood. Instead, she went to boarding school, wrote a thesis on Balzac, and became a teacher. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "