Quotes for All
Obviously there are many, many ways of being an outsider, but having immigrant parents is one of them. For one thing, it makes you a translator: there are all kinds of things that American parents know about life in America ,and about being a kid in America, that non-American parents don’t know, and in many … Read more
The novel tradition is the closest thing I have to a religion, and being a part of that tradition means a lot to me. I don’t really see – I never have seen – why I should have to forfeit that feeling, or hope, of belonging, just because the stories I want to tell are … Read more
I’ve been thinking a lot about why it was so important to me to do The Idiot as a novel, and not a memoir. One reason is the great love of novels that I keep droning on about. I’ve always loved reading novels. I’ve wanted to write novels since I was little. I started my … Read more
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? Elif Batuman
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. Elif Batuman
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 … Read more
I am a great admirer of Henry Jeffreys and have been eagerly awaiting his booze and empire book for many years! Elif Batuman
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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