Elif Batuman Quotes

Quotes about:

• Love is a rare and valuable thing, and you don't get to choose its object. You just go around getting hung up on all the least convenient things-and if the only obstacle in your way is a little extra work, then that's the wonderful gift right there.

  Elif Batuman

  Love Is, Littles, Way

  Elif Batuman (2011). “The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them”, p.79, Granta Books

  45 Copy quote

• If I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that's where we're going to find them.

  Elif Batuman

  Thinking, Starting Over, Answers

  Elif Batuman (2010). “The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them”, p.290, Macmillan

  7 Copy quote

• Part of flirting is that you tend to give each other a little extra slack to be obscure - to say things that are suggestive and nuanced, rather than clear and comprehensible, things you wouldn't put up with in an essay or something written by a stranger - and that can be so exciting.

  Elif Batuman

  Flirting, Giving, Littles

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I've gotten a lot of comfort from the philosophy of the Roman Stoics. For me, one of the most powerful ideas of Stoicism is that you can't pick or choose in the world what you want to happen and what you don't want to happen, and that actually if you did get to choose, the version you would come up with would be unsociable, lame, and basically less beautiful than the truth.

  Elif Batuman

  Beautiful, Powerful, Philosophy

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

  6 Copy quote

• The novel form is about the protagonist's struggle to transform his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as his favorite books.

  Elif Batuman

  Meaningful, Struggle, Book

  Elif Batuman (2011). “The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them”, p.84, Granta Books

  4 Copy quote

• There is salvation - happiness and virtue - in beauty. I would define beauty in this context as a kind of richness, complexity, mystery, diversity, otherness, and unexpectedness - something that comes from the outside.

  Elif Batuman

  Diversity, Kind, Mystery

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

  4 Copy quote

• There's an amazing line in Marcus Aurelius: "The healthy eye ought to see all visible things and not to say, I wish for green things; for this is the condition of a diseased eye." Maybe green is your favorite color - but if you saw everything as green, that wouldn't be a blessing, it would be an eye disease. By the same token, if there was no heartbreak, and everything happened exactly as you want - it would be a less beautiful and meaningful story than the actual story, where you're a part of a huge complicated mysterious whole.

  Elif Batuman

  Beautiful, Meaningful, Eye

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

  4 Copy quote

• Poetry is another space, like love, where we extend that extra credit to the writer.

  Elif Batuman

  Like Love, Space, Credit

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I think it's true that, as is often observed, the writer is always an outsider. A writer is someone who is telling stories about what's going on, which is something you can't do if you're totally caught up in the moment.

  Elif Batuman

  Thinking, Outsiders, Moments

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

  4 Copy quote

• One of the things that really impressed me about Anna Karenina when I first read it was how Tolstoy sets you up to expect certain things to happen - and they don't. Everything is set up for you to think Anna is going to die in childbirth. She dreams it's going to happen, the doctor, Vronsky and Karenin think it's going to happen, and it's what should happen to an adulteress by the rules of a nineteenth-century novel. But then it doesn't happen. It's so fascinating to be left in that space, in a kind of free fall, where you have no idea what's going to happen.

  Elif Batuman

  Dream, Fall, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I think time just goes faster and faster. I'm saying this a few months away from my fortieth birthday. I don't know when and if one's identity ever does catch up with one's actual age. Personally I feel like I just got the hang of thirty-five.

  Elif Batuman

  Thinking, Age, Identity

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• One of my favorite literary theorists, Mikhail Bakhtin, wrote that the defining characteristic of the novel is its unprecedented level of "heteroglossia" - the way it brings together so many different registers of language. He doesn't mean national languages, but rather the sublanguages we all navigate between every day: high language, low language, everything. I think there's something really powerful about the idea of the novel as a space that can bring all these languages together - not just aggregate them, like the Internet is so good at doing, but bring them into a dialogue.

  Elif Batuman

  Powerful, Mean, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• If you're writing a book where you want to make a positive truth claim, then you should absolutely call it nonfiction or memoir. If you don't want to make that claim - if that's not what's important to you; if you're more interested in storytelling and interiority and interpersonal relationships than in objective, checkable facts about the world - then why wouldn't you call it a novel, and take advantage of what that gets you, of the extra freedom, of belonging to the tradition of the novel?

  Elif Batuman

  Book, Writing, Important

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• There are ideas it will be easy to say in the future that we just don't have the language for now.

  Elif Batuman

  Ideas, Language, Easy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  8 Copy quote

• I think any start has to be a false start because really there’s no way to start. You just have to force yourself to sit down and turn off the quality censor. And you have to keep the censor off, or you start second-guessing every other sentence. Sometimes the suspicion of a possible false start comes through, and you have to suppress it to keep writing. But it gets more persistent. And the moment you know it’s really a false start is when you start … it’s hard to put into words.

  Elif Batuman

  Writing, Thinking, Quality

  4 Copy quote

• I think humor is a really important way of creating solidarity - like, through humor you can make people realize that certain situations, where they thought they were alone, are actually shared by everyone.

  Elif Batuman

  Thinking, Creating, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  36 Copy quote

• When you invent something, you're drawing on reservoirs of knowledge that you already have. It's only when you're faithful to the truth that something can come to you from the outside.

  Elif Batuman

  Writing, Drawing, Faithful

  4 Copy quote

• When a novelist manages to describe or evoke something you thought or felt, without realizing that other people also found themselves in the same situation and had the same feelings, it creates that same solidarity. Maybe it's better to think of humor not as a tool to express the solidarity, but a kind of by-product. Maybe the realization "I'm not on my own on this one" is always, or often, funny.

  Elif Batuman

  Thinking, People, Feelings

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Writing fiction lets you be a little more emotional and unguarded, a little freer. Writing fictional characters is also really different from writing about real people. In nonfiction, you can only say so much about the people you interact with. After all, they're actual people, their version of their story trumps yours. In a novel, you can build a character, using certain parts or impressions of someone you know, and guessing or inventing others, without having to worry that your guesses or memories or inventions are wrong.

  Elif Batuman

  Memories, Real, Character

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

  7 Copy quote

• Humor is really important to me. All my favorite writers are writers I consider to be funny, including Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, even though that's not necessarily their rap.

  Elif Batuman

  Rap, Important, My Favorite

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I thought clarity of communication was the most important thing in writing, and if you really cared about getting your idea across, you would say it in the most straightforward way possible. Later, in college and grad school, I came to realize that language is a technology like any other, and that it's always evolving - clarity of expression is always evolving.

  Elif Batuman

  Communication, Writing, School

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  7 Copy quote

• I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years--it took the experience of lived time--to realize that they really are the same thing.

  Elif Batuman

  Truth, Years, Care

  Elif Batuman (2011). “The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them”, p.10, Granta Books

  4 Copy quote

• When you're reading a novel, I think the reason you care about how any given plot turns out is that you take it as a data point in the big story of how the world works. Does such-and-such a kind of guy get the girl in the end? Does adultery ever bring happiness? How do winners become winners?

  Elif Batuman

  Girl, Book, Reading

  "The Rumpus Interview With Elif Batuman". Interview with Sean Carman, therumpus.net. April 25, 2012.

  6 Copy quote

• Nom de Plume uses the device of the pseudonym to unite the likes of Charlotte Bronte, Mark Twain, Fernando Pessoa, and Patricia Highsmith into a cohesive yet highly idiosyncratic literary history. Each page affords sparkling facts and valuable insights onto the manufacturing of books and reputations, the keeping and revealing of secrets, the vagaries of private life and public opinion, and the eternally mysterious, often tormented interface between life and literature.

  Elif Batuman

  Book, Secret, Public Opinion

  9 Copy quote

• I am a great admirer of Henry Jeffreys and have been eagerly awaiting his booze and empire book for many years!

  Elif Batuman

  Book, Years, Empires

  4 Copy quote

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