Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It's so embarrassing and painful to be young.
Soccer is taken extremely seriously in Turkey.
Awkwardness is the consciousness of a false position.
People are shaped by friendship as much as by romance.
By the time I got to college, the Cold War was basically over.
I don't believe in being ashamed about not having read things.
'Awkward' implies both solidarity and implication. Nobody is exempt.
To think of Tolstoy eating a sandwich is intrinsically kind of funny.
I find something very appealing about taking literature very literally.
Everyone has a certain amount of bad writing to get out of their system.
Lists are based on realism - on the coldly contemplated finitude of resources.
As a novelist, you write about social mores, but not everything can be explained.
No time you spend writing will be wasted - even if you write something that's bad.
Poetry is another space, like love, where we extend that extra credit to the writer.
A lot of fiction doesn't answer a question that any reasonable person would ever ask.
At any given time, there are ideas and images that can only be communicated indirectly.
Being in a heterosexual relationship for a woman is always implicitly a little bit humiliating.
There are ideas it will be easy to say in the future that we just don't have the language for now.
It's important not to censor yourself and not to get upset or demoralized when you write bad stuff.
There are very few things that I have any patience for that are not at least a little bit humorous.
You can't invent something you have no epistemological access to. In a way, it's all recombination.
Listing and counting have a spooky, magical power, and the holiday season is a spooky, magical time.
If, for a moment, it seemed that September 11th could be identified with Iraq, the illusion was short-lived.
Anyone who has ever tried to plot a detective mystery knows that the hardest thing to come up with is motive.
Read enough about the dung beetle, and a picture of its character emerges: patient, optimistic, uncomplaining.
When you started looking at the life of Tolstoy, there was so much passion and anger and drama surrounding him.
I am a great admirer of Henry Jeffreys and have been eagerly awaiting his booze and empire book for many years!
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.
I grew up thinking that it was immoral to idealize the past because, in the past, there was slavery and no penicillin.
There's definitely a culture of Russian literature in Turkey. And in the U.S. too, to an extent - especially Dostoevsky.
The first time I held an African drum in my hands was at Koc University in a forest in the northern suburbs of Istanbul.
Most Americans have probably heard the song 'Santa Claus Is Coming to Town' about a billion times in the supermarket alone.
I love the novelist's freedom of going into different people's subjectivity and being able to work with them as characters.
'Constructed Worlds' comes from a novel draft that I wrote in my early twenties and reread/revised only in my late thirties.
'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.
The one text that most changed my opinion on criticism was probably Freud's 'Interpretation of Dreams,' which I read in college.
Imagination is really dependent on memory and observation, these things that we think of as part of nonfiction writing, actually.
There's a lot to be said for an American-style liberal-arts education, which prevents young people from professionalizing right away.
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.
People don't become writers because they love having spontaneous, real-world interactions with living people as bodies with clothes in time.
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.'
One of the stories that really impressed me was 'Anna Karenina.' As a novel, that made an impression on me, showing me what the novel can do.
The Himalayan glaciers, China's trade surplus, Olympic ice hockey - the world is full of pressing subjects that people never consult me about.
When I read that nobody should ever feel ashamed to be alone or to be in a crowd, I realized that I often felt ashamed of both of those things.
My family is not only not religious, but my parents are both - they're secularists. My father is actually an atheist and feels very strongly about it.
At the beginning of 'A Christmas Carol,' Scrooge embodies one of the central tenets of depression: that one has always been this way - and always will be.
For much of my adult life, I believed, inaccurately, that I knew the story of Charles Dickens's 'A Christmas Carol' - that I remembered it from childhood.
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.
The novel form is about the protagonist's struggle to transform his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as his favorite books.
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.