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.
A-Z Quotes. 2020. TOP 25 QUOTES BY ELIF BATUMAN | A-Z Quotes. [online] Available at: <https://www.azquotes.com/author/38763-Elif_Batuman> [Accessed 7 June 2020].
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 life, or seduce your way into it.
A-Z Quotes. 2020. TOP 25 QUOTES BY ELIF BATUMAN | A-Z Quotes. [online] Available at: <https://www.azquotes.com/author/38763-Elif_Batuman> [Accessed 7 June 2020].
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.
A-Z Quotes. 2020. TOP 25 QUOTES BY ELIF BATUMAN | A-Z Quotes. [online] Available at: <https://www.azquotes.com/author/38763-Elif_Batuman> [Accessed 7 June 2020].
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 sound like you’re talking down to your audience, or like you yourself are a reductive simpleton.
A-Z Quotes. 2020. TOP 25 QUOTES BY ELIF BATUMAN | A-Z Quotes. [online] Available at: <https://www.azquotes.com/author/38763-Elif_Batuman> [Accessed 7 June 2020].
I think it’s true that, as is often observed, the writer is always an outsider. A writer is someone who is telling stories about what’s going on, which is something you can’t do if you’re totally caught up in the moment.
A-Z Quotes. 2020. TOP 25 QUOTES BY ELIF BATUMAN | A-Z Quotes. [online] Available at: <https://www.azquotes.com/author/38763-Elif_Batuman> [Accessed 7 June 2020].
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.
A-Z Quotes. 2020. TOP 25 QUOTES BY ELIF BATUMAN | A-Z Quotes. [online] Available at: <https://www.azquotes.com/author/38763-Elif_Batuman> [Accessed 7 June 2020].
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.
A-Z Quotes. 2020. TOP 25 QUOTES BY ELIF BATUMAN | A-Z Quotes. [online] Available at: <https://www.azquotes.com/author/38763-Elif_Batuman> [Accessed 7 June 2020].
Poetry is another space, like love, where we extend that extra credit to the writer.
A-Z Quotes. 2020. TOP 25 QUOTES BY ELIF BATUMAN | A-Z Quotes. [online] Available at: <https://www.azquotes.com/author/38763-Elif_Batuman> [Accessed 7 June 2020].
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.
A-Z Quotes. 2020. TOP 25 QUOTES BY ELIF BATUMAN | A-Z Quotes. [online] Available at: <https://www.azquotes.com/author/38763-Elif_Batuman> [Accessed 7 June 2020].
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.
A-Z Quotes. 2020. TOP 25 QUOTES BY ELIF BATUMAN | A-Z Quotes. [online] Available at: <https://www.azquotes.com/author/38763-Elif_Batuman> [Accessed 7 June 2020].
There’s an amazing line in Marcus Aurelius: “The healthy eye ought to see all visible things and not to say, I wish for green things; for this is the condition of a diseased eye.” Maybe green is your favorite color – but if you saw everything as green, that wouldn’t be a blessing, it would be an eye disease. By the same token, if there was no heartbreak, and everything happened exactly as you want – it would be a less beautiful and meaningful story than the actual story, where you’re a part of a huge complicated mysterious whole.
A-Z Quotes. 2020. TOP 25 QUOTES BY ELIF BATUMAN | A-Z Quotes. [online] Available at: <https://www.azquotes.com/author/38763-Elif_Batuman> [Accessed 7 June 2020].
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?
A-Z Quotes. 2020. TOP 25 QUOTES BY ELIF BATUMAN | A-Z Quotes. [online] Available at: <https://www.azquotes.com/author/38763-Elif_Batuman> [Accessed 7 June 2020].
When a novelist manages to describe or evoke something you thought or felt, without realizing that other people also found themselves in the same situation and had the same feelings, it creates that same solidarity. Maybe it’s better to think of humor not as a tool to express the solidarity, but a kind of by-product. Maybe the realization ‘I’m not on my own on this one’ is always, or often, funny.
A-Z Quotes. 2020. TOP 25 QUOTES BY ELIF BATUMAN | A-Z Quotes. [online] Available at: <https://www.azquotes.com/author/38763-Elif_Batuman> [Accessed 7 June 2020].
There are ideas it will be easy to say in the future that we just don’t have the language for now.
A-Z Quotes. 2020. TOP 25 QUOTES BY ELIF BATUMAN | A-Z Quotes. [online] Available at: <https://www.azquotes.com/author/38763-Elif_Batuman> [Accessed 7 June 2020].
I thought clarity of communication was the most important thing in writing, and if you really cared about getting your idea across, you would say it in the most straightforward way possible. Later, in college and grad school, I came to realize that language is a technology like any other, and that it’s always evolving – clarity of expression is always evolving.
A-Z Quotes. 2020. TOP 25 QUOTES BY ELIF BATUMAN | A-Z Quotes. [online] Available at: <https://www.azquotes.com/author/38763-Elif_Batuman> [Accessed 7 June 2020].
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.
A-Z Quotes. 2020. TOP 25 QUOTES BY ELIF BATUMAN | A-Z Quotes. [online] Available at: <https://www.azquotes.com/author/38763-Elif_Batuman> [Accessed 7 June 2020].
Rolando Andrés Ramos 
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