Quotes for All
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 … Read more
At any given time, there are ideas and images that can only be communicated indirectly. Elif Batuman
It’s really a trade-off: you’re always having to decide whether you’re going to say the more ambitious thing, and lose a little clarity – or are you going to say something really clearly, and sacrifice a little nuance? Get too obscure, and you sound like a pretentious asshole; go overboard with the clarity, and you … Read more
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
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
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 … Read more
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. … Read more
In a way all writers are writing against death, because writing is an attempt to defy the passage of time, to refuse to let the past disappear and be forgotten, and to refuse to let the present become the past – to try to keep living another day, to try to talk your way into … Read more
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 … Read more
Now that I’m almost forty, I look back at some of the decisions I made when I was younger – decisions that I thought of as courageous, or generous, or otherwise befitting a writer; befitting someone who had taken it as their life’s goal to understand the human condition – and I wish I could … Read more