Quotes by Elif Batuman

Elif Batuman

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.

Book

Kids

Reading

At any given time, there are ideas and images that can only be communicated indirectly.

Given

Ideas

Everyone is used to speaking a slightly different “language” with their parents than with their peers, because spoken language changes every generation – like they say, the past is a foreign country – but I think this is intensified for children whose parents also grew up in a geographically foreign country.

Children

Country

Past

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.

Important

My Favorite

Rap

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

Book

Empires

Years

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.

Care

Truth

Years

I do like the idea of the novel of repressed college students being a contemporary novel of courtship! I guess what I would say to that is, we tend to think of historical periods and historical mores as ending a lot more concretely than they do. Like, in an Austen novel, there are lots of reasons – cultural, moral, religious – why the characters don’t have sex during courtship. Maybe, even though those reasons have kind of expired, historically, they’re still around in some sense.

Character

Religious

Sex

I don’t think anything can substitute long talks, and long talks are somehow never as easy to schedule again as they were in school, when most people – at least in my little socioeconomic corner of the world – live not with their families or sexual partners, but with same-sex friends. I really miss that from college. I never really thought at the time about how things would never be that way again.

College

School

Sex

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.

Quality

Thinking

Writing

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.

Creating

People

Thinking

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Age

Ambitious

Answers

Beautiful

Book

Care

Character

Children

College

Communication

Country

Creating

Credit

Decision

Diversity

Drawing

Dream

Easy

Emotional

Empires

Eye

Faithful

Fall

Feelings

Flirting

Girl

Given

Giving

Goal

Guy

Health Care

Hours

Ideas

Identity

Important

Kids

Kind

Language

Like Love

Littles

Love Is

Mean

Meaningful

Memories

Moments

My Favorite

Mystery

Outsiders

Past

People

The Future Blueprint

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The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

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The Autobiography

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The Behaviour Diary

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The Dating Diary

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The Relationship Therapist

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Quotes by Elif Batuman

Elif Batuman

At any given time, there are ideas and images that can only be communicated indirectly.

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.

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

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.

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.

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Topics by Elif Batuman

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The Future Blueprint

The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

The Autobiography

The Behaviour Diary

The Dating Diary

The Relationship Therapist

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