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The one text that most changed my opinion on criticism was probably Freud's 'Interpretation of Dreams,' which I read in college.
Elif Batuman
It's important not to censor yourself and not to get upset or demoralized when you write bad stuff.
No time you spend writing will be wasted - even if you write something that's bad.
I don't believe in being ashamed about not having read things.
I actually really wish I had written 'The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying' as an unreliably narrated novel that is also a self-help book.
Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time,' especially 'Time Regained,' made me think differently about what the novel is and can do. Then I forgot about it, then reread it and remembered again.
Many books have changed my life, but only one has the word 'life-changing' in the title: Marie Kondo's 'The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying.'
I'm Turkish-American; I was a freshman at Harvard in 1995 and 96. I did teach English in Hungary in the summer of 1996. I'm an autobiographical writer in the sense that whether in fiction or nonfiction, the issues and relationships and phenomena and problems I'm most interested in exploring are the ones I've experienced personally.
I love the novelist's freedom of going into different people's subjectivity and being able to work with them as characters.
I had wanted to write 'The Possessed' as fiction, but everyone told me that no one would read a novel about graduate students. It seems almost uncivilized to tell someone writing a novel, 'No, you have to call this a memoir.'
I like a novel to have a certain amount of dead time and filler - unremarkable scenery, descriptions of getting from point A to point B, dialogue in which not much is said - in between the parts that are electric. With a long work that you don't read in one sitting, I think that makes for the best reading experience.
There's a lot to be said for an American-style liberal-arts education, which prevents young people from professionalizing right away.
Soccer is taken extremely seriously in Turkey.
The Himalayan glaciers, China's trade surplus, Olympic ice hockey - the world is full of pressing subjects that people never consult me about.
Every time a meteor comes close to the earth, we all think about the end of the world - but our internal soundtrack doesn't turn off. We're also thinking about pizza or passing a slow tractor or making a turn, and for a magical instant, our lives seem to be in conversation with the stars.
Anyone who has ever tried to plot a detective mystery knows that the hardest thing to come up with is motive.
When I was growing up, many of my relatives had never seen a black person before. Today, hundreds, maybe thousands of Africans live in Istanbul's old city alone. It's hard to imagine their lives in their human totality.
The first time I held an African drum in my hands was at Koc University in a forest in the northern suburbs of Istanbul.
Lists are based on realism - on the coldly contemplated finitude of resources.
Why is there an end of the year? Because the calendar imposes numerical order on time. There is a natural fitness in the celebration of the New Year, a holiday of numbers imposed on things, with lists, as well as with Advent calendars and songs like 'The Twelve Days of Christmas.'
Listing and counting have a spooky, magical power, and the holiday season is a spooky, magical time.
It's possible to watch 'Gone Girl' and feel that you have seen something terribly bleak. But it's also possible to receive it as good news. Any powerful articulation of the need for change is also a testimony to the possibility of change.
'Gone Girl' is as much about the near impossibility of being a good husband as it is about the anguish of being a good wife.
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.