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 somethin…

- Elif Batuman

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

- Elif Batuman

I think time just goes faster and faster. I'm saying this a few months away from my fortieth birthday. I don't know when and if one's identity ever d…

- Elif Batuman

The novel form is about the protagonist's struggle to transform his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as his fav…

- Elif Batuman

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…

- Elif Batuman

If you think about Don Quixote, Don Quixote is this guy who wants to live as if he was in a medieval chivalric romance, when actually he lives in six…

- Elif Batuman

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…

- Elif Batuman

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

- Elif Batuman

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, whi…

- Elif Batuman