American - Author | 1977 -
No time you spend writing will be wasted - even if you write something that's bad.
Elif Batuman
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Everyone has a certain amount of bad writing to get out of their system.
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It's important not to censor yourself and not to get upset or demoralized when you write bad stuff.
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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.
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Much as there are things about our own life stories that we can learn only from the systematic study of our dreams, there are things about the human condition that we can learn only from a systematic study of literature.
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I always wanted to write novels, even before I had read a lot of novels or had a very good idea of what they were.
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The novel is like a melancholy form. It's about some kind of disillusionment with the way things are versus the idea of how they could be or how they used to be.
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The problems in the Russian novel are quite similar to the problems of Turkish nationalism and Turkish culture, which was something that I grew up thinking didn't affect me very much because my parents didn't really talk about it.
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Even in novels where the love relationship isn't the focus, I feel like it's often there, and the background is some barometer of whether this is a happy or sad story or whether this is a successful or unsuccessful life.
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When in doubt, it is better to do the less conservative thing and to err on the side of the more colorful, possibly terrible mistake. That comes from thinking of yourself as a writer.
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If you are in a breakup, you might as well go all the way and spend the summer in Samarkand, with no air-conditioning, learning a language you have no use for. At least it adds some romance to a depressing situation.
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By the time I got to college, the Cold War was basically over.
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