Quotes from Elif Batuman

As a novelist, you write about social mores, but not everything can be explained.

Imagination is really dependent on memory and observation, these things that we think of as part of nonfiction writing, actually.

Tolstoy didn't know about steampunk or cyborgs, but he did know about the nightmarishness of steam power, unruly machines, and the creepy half-human status of the Russian peasant classes. In 'Anna Karenina,' nineteenth-century life itself is a relentless, relentlessly modern machine, flattening those who oppose it.

Even in novels where the love relationship isn't the focus, I feel like it's often there, and the background is some barometer of whether this is a happy or sad story or whether this is a successful or unsuccessful life.

It's important not to censor yourself and not to get upset or demoralized when you write bad stuff.

My family is very feminist, and they consider that Islam is not a super feminist religion, which I know people can argue about. But that's - anyway that's how I was brought up, so it would be odd for me to suddenly just up and start wearing a headscarf.

My family is not only not religious, but my parents are both - they're secularists. My father is actually an atheist and feels very strongly about it.

One of the most painful parts of a breakup is having the feeling that your life is a story, and then the other person leaves and takes the story with them. And you're left there without it. You're left in this version of life that's basically a succession of events and interactions that don't seem to be going anywhere.

I love the novelist's freedom of going into different people's subjectivity and being able to work with them as characters.

The first time I held an African drum in my hands was at Koc University in a forest in the northern suburbs of Istanbul.

I don't believe in being ashamed about not having read things.

The novel is like a melancholy form. It's about some kind of disillusionment with the way things are versus the idea of how they could be or how they used to be.

Awkwardness comes from the realization that, when you look around the world, it's difficult to identify anyone who isn't either the victim or the beneficiary of injustice.

I find something very appealing about taking literature very literally.

People are shaped by friendship as much as by romance.