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" 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. "
Elif Batuman
Better
Mistake
Yourself
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" When you started looking at the life of Tolstoy, there was so much passion and anger and drama surrounding him. "
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" 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? "
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" 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.' "
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" Soccer is taken extremely seriously in Turkey. "
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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. "
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Grandmother
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" 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. "
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Former
Women
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" There is this way that I felt when I was younger that we were beyond history and we were all citizens of the world that now seems so naive. "
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" Lists are based on realism - on the coldly contemplated finitude of resources. "
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Resources
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Lists
" I like a novel to have a certain amount of dead time and filler - unremarkable scenery, descriptions of getting from point A to point B, dialogue in which not much is said - in between the parts that are electric. With a long work that you don't read in one sitting, I think that makes for the best reading experience. "
Elif Batuman
Experience
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Best
" Awkwardness is the consciousness of a false position. "
Elif Batuman
Position
Consciousness
False
" I grew up thinking that it was immoral to idealize the past because, in the past, there was slavery and no penicillin. "
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Thinking
Up
" A lot of what I write is very personal. "
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Very
" Russian literature got me interested in what literature means. "
Elif Batuman
Interested
Literature
Me
" 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. "
Elif Batuman
Enjoy
Aesthetic
Confused
" The Himalayan glaciers, China's trade surplus, Olympic ice hockey - the world is full of pressing subjects that people never consult me about. "
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Me
World
Trade
" 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. "
Elif Batuman
Look
Injustice
Victim
" 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. "
Elif Batuman
Think
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" There's definitely a culture of Russian literature in Turkey. And in the U.S. too, to an extent - especially Dostoevsky. "
Elif Batuman
Turkey
Literature
Too
" 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. "
Elif Batuman
Lost
Time
Think
" 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. "
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Work
Feel
" 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. "
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Weird
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Early
" Being in a heterosexual relationship for a woman is always implicitly a little bit humiliating. "
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Always
Little
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" 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. "
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Problems
Parents
Thinking
" 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. "
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End
Think
Thinking
" I find something very appealing about taking literature very literally. "
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Very
Find
Something
" 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. "
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Alone
Today
Live
" 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. "
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Think
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" Everyone has a certain amount of bad writing to get out of their system. "
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Writing
Everyone
Get
" No time you spend writing will be wasted - even if you write something that's bad. "
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Will
You
Time
" 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. "
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Me
Life
Know