Elif Batuman Quotes About Books

Quotes about: Books

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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.

• 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

• In the last volume of In Search of Lost Time, Proust compares himself to Scheherazade: he says he has finally understood the nature of the book he has to write, just at the moment when his advancing years and declining health have made him doubt that he's going to live long enough to write it. So he has to write against death like Scheherazade.

  Elif Batuman

  Book, Writing, Years

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• As a grad student and later as a writer, I have found it hard to sustain the pure, almost erotic love of reading I had as a kid - you know, where you climb in bed and read for hours and hours, and the book itself is this charged magical object. Later, when writing becomes your job, it's tied up with ego and all kinds of worry, and it's not always easy to get to that state of pure escape.

  Elif Batuman

  Reading, Book, Kids

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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