Elif Batuman Quotes

It was not just that Ross Macdonald taught us how to write; he did something much more, he taught us how to read, and how to think about life, and maybe, in some small, but mattering way, how to live.

I found 'The Twin' sitting on a coffee table at a writers' colony in 2009. It carried praise from J.M. Coetzee. That seemed ample justification for using it to avoid my own writing. I finished it - weeping - a day later, and I've been puzzling over its powerful hold on me ever since.

The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity.

A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

What I've tended to do is to use my own experiences to get into someone else's mind, like in Wuthering Heights.

The function of the novel is the exploration of the human condition. Really, that's what it's all about.

Good fiction can both entertain and light up those dark corners where nice people don't want to go.

'MotherFatherSon' was just an extraordinary read and I wanted to be a part of it.

Incarcerated individuals want what most people want in a novel: good, honest writing and a story well told.

Becoming a writer can kind of spoil your reading because you kind of read on tracks. You're reading as someone who wants to enjoy the book but also, as a writer, noticing the techniques that the writer uses and especially the ones that make you want to turn the page to see what happened.

The book is the book and it will always be there. It's a quiet ending. In the book it's a contemplative ending which I think you could certainly do that in a movie.

I think the way you become a good storyteller is to read a lot of stories and evaluate them in your own mind.

Probably a good idea, let me know how it ends" "I already know how it ends" "You read the ending first?" "I always read the ending before I commit to the whole book." "If you know how it ends, why read the book?" "I don't read for the ending. I read for the story".

It can be hard to write a skillfully entertaining fiction, but a great book wants to be more, and wants more from us.

A lot of novels use crime as a stepping stone to talk about greater issues. So I just think of myself as a writer.

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.

I remember that the day I finished 'The Angels,' part three of 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative.

A short story is something that you can hold in your mind. You can really analyze how the entire thing works, like a machine.

I have a hard time finding something that I really enjoy reading, but I read 'The Great Gatsby' every summer.

The problem with themes is that writers don't realise they are themes until someone points them out.

I think mystery writers and thriller writers - whatever genre you want to call it - are taking on some of the biggest, most interesting kind of socioeconomic issues around in a really interesting, compelling way.

The really courageous and bold thing is to make movies about human behaviour.

My wife read Narc as well and was really into it.

The function of the novelist... is to comment upon life as he sees it.