American author (1977- )
It's so rare in the world to meet somebody you connect to. Most people are so awful. In the big picture, bad breath just seems relatively manageable.
ELIF BATUMAN
The Idiot
There is no suffering if you don't want anything.
ELIF BATUMAN
The Idiot
Well, for a long time I was disinclined to write about anything very political. One of the things that really made me very upset from an early age was -- I've been trying to write about it recently -- when the news would be turned on, the way that the whole room would go quiet and the way, particularly, I felt women were sort of hushed and it was the time for everyone to watch the news and the men were always more interested in it than the women. There was no aura of seriousness like that that attached itself to the game shows or the soap operas or whatever other shows, it was just the news, and it was like, this is life or death. And yet the picture that they showed on the news was so gendered. It's the deeds of men, the decisions of men, it's men talking.
ELIF BATUMAN
interview, The White Review, June 2017
It was weird what was enough to make you feel good or bad, even though your basic life circumstances were the same.
ELIF BATUMAN
The Idiot
My policy at the time was that, when confronted by two courses of action, one should always choose the less conservative and more generous. I thought this was tantamount to a moral obligation for anyone who had any advantages at all, and especially for anyone who wanted to be a writer.
ELIF BATUMAN
The Idiot
Beautiful people lived in a different world, had different relations with people. From the beginning they were raised for love.
ELIF BATUMAN
The Idiot
I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time--the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back.
ELIF BATUMAN
The Idiot
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.
ELIF BATUMAN
The Possessed
Europe was so small. It seemed weird that people took it so seriously.
ELIF BATUMAN
The Idiot
Such are the ills of our time, which flounders between apocalypse and normalcy. Are we in a crisis, or aren’t we?
ELIF BATUMAN
"On Complaining,", London Review of Books, Nov. 20, 2008
As a novelist you write about social mores, but not everything can be explained. You want to make the familiar strange and memorable again, and an easy shortcut is to make your protagonist young, clueless and innocent.
ELIF BATUMAN
The Guardian, May 26, 2017
I don't know if I ended up siding with the academics just because I happened to end up in graduate school, or if I ended up in graduate school because I already secretly sided with the academics. In any case, I stopped believing that "theory" had the power to ruin literature for anyone, or that it was possible to compromise something you loved by studying it. Was love really such a tenuous thing? Wasn't the point of love that it made you want to learn more, to immerse yourself, to become possessed?
ELIF BATUMAN
The Possessed
As for unhappy families, star-crossed lovers, and exiled heroes, they are simply universal.
ELIF BATUMAN
The Possessed
I began to intuit dimly why people drank when they went dancing, and it occurred to me that maybe the reason preschool had felt the way it had was that one had had to go through the whole thing sober.
ELIF BATUMAN
The Idiot
That's what I always tell myself when I'm being fact-checked, and some detail I was attached to turns out not to be true. I'm initially disappointed, and maybe discouraged that now there's more work for me to do, but I know that 99.9% of the time there's actually something there, in the truth, that's more interesting than whatever I or anyone else can make up.
ELIF BATUMAN
interview, The Rumpus, Apr. 25, 2012
The things that interest me and the stories I want to write, their factual accuracy is not something I want to make a claim about. I don't want people to know what details are true and which ones aren't. I love the novelist's freedom of going into different people's subjectivity and being able to work with them as characters.
ELIF BATUMAN
"Elif Batuman on Fictionalizing Her Life and Learning to Fact Check", LitHub, March 21, 2017
I ended up taking a literature class, too, about the nineteenth-century novel and the city in Russia, England, and France. The professor often talked about the inadequacy of published translations, reading us passages from novels in French and Russian, to show how bad the translations were. I didn't understand anything he said in French or Russian, so I preferred the translations.
ELIF BATUMAN
The Idiot
I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo, and I realized for the first time that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, rooted for Dumbo, against Dumbo's tormentors. Invariably they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to his enemies. But they're you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? They didn't know. It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo.
ELIF BATUMAN
The Idiot
I learned many interesting things from Delia: for example, that she and Gulya had both married alcoholics, but Delia's alcoholic had taken all her money, whereas Gulya had managed her alcoholic well and taken all his money.
ELIF BATUMAN
The Possessed
It seemed very remarkable that you could travel halfway around the world and still end up looking at some ducks.
ELIF BATUMAN
The Idiot