Elif Batuman Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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.

In a lot of ways, being a writer is a lousy job - grueling, emotionally taxing, terrible hours, no health care - so if it wasn't about love, what would be the point?

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

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.

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.

People are shaped by friendship as much as by romance.

I try really hard to cultivate the pure love of reading, to make time for it, because it would be really sad to still be a writer without remembering why, on some visceral, emotional level.

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.

What does literature do better than anything else? It provides a detailed representation of the inner experience of being alive in a given time and place.