Elif Batuman Quotes

I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature.

I love Martin Amis.

As a former English major, I have always been fascinated by the connections between literature and history.

I'm interested in everything. I don't see why Borges can't work along with Neil Gaiman, or Stephen King can't be mixed with Balzac. It's just storytelling; it's different ways of using codes and images and words and sounds.

I wish I had read more and majored in literature rather than theatre. I think I would have been a better artist for it. I am trying to play catch-up now.

I'm always interested in contemporary fiction.

I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic - 'Moby-Dick' is just about the best book in the world - and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence.

I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.

In 'Min Kamp,' I wanted to see how far it was possible to take realism before it would be impossible to read.

I did modern English and American literature at Kent University, with no Chaucer and no Middle English: a perfect course.

I wasn't a very good writer before college. I don't think I was a very good reader.

I had read Harold Bloom's 'Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?' Late in his life, having read everything, Bloom asked which books had given him wisdom. I had just read a bunch of contemporary novels that had no wisdom for me.

I do believe in that thing about the reading audience being very important to the formation of the novel at its birth.

I'm a pluralist about perspectives on literature. There seem to me to be all sorts of illuminating ways of responding to major literary works, some of them paying considerable attention to context, others applying various theoretical ideas, yet others focusing on details of language, or linking the work to the author's life, or connecting it with other works.

A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.

I love the human mind.

If contemporary literary fiction doesn't read a bit like science fiction then it's probably not all that contemporary, is it

Enough if every age produce two or three critics of this esoteric class, with here and there a reader to understand them.

There's a reason you can learn from everything: you have basic wisdom, basic intelligence, and basic goodness.

To say that an author is a reader or a reader an author, to see a book as a human being or a human being a book, to describe the world as text or a text as the world, are ways of naming the readers craft.

Jim Harrison is someone I always enjoy, one of the great contemporary writers. I like Tim Ferris' Big Boom Theory. I'm getting into a different kind of reading, not straight novels.

It's an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not at all. You shouldn't be taught to monkey with it.

The latest literary discussions reflect a struggle between two artistic methods - romanticism and realism, with the latter clearly ascendant for the time being.

Cease to be a disobedient child in the school of experience, and begin to learn, with humility and patience, the lessons that are set for your ultimate perfection.

The book is finished by the reader. A good novel should invite the reader in and let the reader participate in the creative experience and bring their own life experiences to it, interpret with their own individual life experiences. Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.