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" People don't become writers because they love having spontaneous, real-world interactions with living people as bodies with clothes in time. "
Elif Batuman
Clothes
Time
People
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" 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. "
Elif Batuman
Grandmother
Teacher
School
" When you started looking at the life of Tolstoy, there was so much passion and anger and drama surrounding him. "
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Anger
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" 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. "
Elif Batuman
Religion
True
Parents
" 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. "
Elif Batuman
Weird
You
Early
" There are very few things that I have any patience for that are not at least a little bit humorous. "
Elif Batuman
Few
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Little
" 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? "
Elif Batuman
Story
Past
Looking Back
" 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. "
Elif Batuman
School
Age
Education
" My family is very feminist, and they consider that Islam is not a super feminist religion, which I know people can argue about. But that's - anyway that's how I was brought up, so it would be odd for me to suddenly just up and start wearing a headscarf. "
Elif Batuman
Me
Family
Religion
" 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. "
Elif Batuman
Walk
Things
Head
" 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. "
Elif Batuman
Feeling
Life Is A
Story
" 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. "
Elif Batuman
Summer
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Problems
" If, for a moment, it seemed that September 11th could be identified with Iraq, the illusion was short-lived. "
Elif Batuman
September
Illusion
Moment
" 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
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" I love the novelist's freedom of going into different people's subjectivity and being able to work with them as characters. "
Elif Batuman
Different
Love
People
" No time you spend writing will be wasted - even if you write something that's bad. "
Elif Batuman
Will
You
Time
" 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.' "
Elif Batuman
Life
Magic
My Life
" 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. "
Elif Batuman
Really
Magic
Life-Changing
" 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
" Everyone has a certain amount of bad writing to get out of their system. "
Elif Batuman
Writing
Everyone
Get
" Most Americans have probably heard the song 'Santa Claus Is Coming to Town' about a billion times in the supermarket alone. "
Elif Batuman
Song
Coming
Heard
" 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. "
Elif Batuman
Think
What You Love
You
" 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. "
Elif Batuman
Love
Sad
Relationship
" It's so embarrassing and painful to be young. "
Elif Batuman
Young
Embarrassing
Painful
" Awkwardness is the consciousness of a false position. "
Elif Batuman
Position
Consciousness
False
" 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. "
Elif Batuman
Alone
Today
Live
" 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.' "
Elif Batuman
Intelligence
Father
God
" It's important not to censor yourself and not to get upset or demoralized when you write bad stuff. "
Elif Batuman
Important
Bad
Upset
" 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
" 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. "
Elif Batuman
Feel
Alone
Ashamed
" I find something very appealing about taking literature very literally. "
Elif Batuman
Very
Find
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