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" 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. "

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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. "

Elif Batuman

Song

Coming

Heard

" 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 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. "

" 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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

Family

Religion

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" A lot of fiction doesn't answer a question that any reasonable person would ever ask. "

" 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.' "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

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

" 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'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. "

" 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. "

" The first time I held an African drum in my hands was at Koc University in a forest in the northern suburbs of Istanbul. "

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

" 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

" 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. "