Elif Batuman Quotes
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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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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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I love the novelist's freedom of going into different people's subjectivity and being able to work with them as characters.
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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.
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The first modern novel was already a product, even an expression, of negative criticism: 'Don Quixote' contains a quite explicit critique of the chivalric romance and its insufficiency to account for the way real life feels when you get up in the morning in 17th-century Spain.
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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.
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Soccer is taken extremely seriously in Turkey.
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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.
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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.
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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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I find something very appealing about taking literature very literally.
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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.
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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.
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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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Listing and counting have a spooky, magical power, and the holiday season is a spooky, magical time.
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By the time I got to college, the Cold War was basically over.
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You base your actions on a projected ending, which you actually don't know. However, when you reach the crucial point, and the pinnacle event doesn't occur, you just need to go on, and something else will happen.
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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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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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There's definitely a culture of Russian literature in Turkey. And in the U.S. too, to an extent - especially Dostoevsky.
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There's a lot to be said for an American-style liberal-arts education, which prevents young people from professionalizing right away.
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I like to think that I know a lot of words, but I definitely don't know all of them.
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A lot of what I write is very personal.
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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.