Elif Batuman Quotes

Write about society as news and treat it like sociology.

All my books are adventures, but they also have a social viewpoint.

If the reader looks, I think he will find plenty of moral and political ideas in my stories.

In all my movies, be it 'Page 3', 'Chandni Bar' or 'Corporate,' I have tried to depict honesty and reality.

You can find inspiration for man's behaviour wherever you look.

I work in an old tradition that goes back to the ancient Greeks. You hold a mirror to crime to see what's happening in society. I could never write a crime story just for the sake of it, because I always want to talk about certain things in society.

It seems to me that you would have to write a novel on a very small, intimate scale for it not to become political.

I tend to write society as I see and understand it.

Although everything has a political connotation today, 'Mulk' is a social film, to be honest. It is not about any political leader, party or ideology.

Having written for film and television, I had little interest in turning 'The Good Father' into a Hollywood thriller. I was writing a novel, and novels demand that the writer goes deeper, both emotionally and thematically.

I wanted to do something in the style of a comedy of manners.

I thought this was the most incredible opportunity. Because 'Planet Of The Apes,' aside from the fantasy element of talking apes, is such an amazing franchise, because under the surface of that genre, you're actually looking at human nature.

I think we present extreme aspects of human behavior and hopefully get at times, messages across or bring issues to the table or as we so often say, shed light into the dark crevices of human nature.

We do not look in our great cities for our best morality.

History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.

Is there nothing the prodigiously talented Ann Patchett can't do? She's channeled the world of opera, Boston politics, magic, unwed motherhood, and race relations, creating scenarios so indelible, you swear they are right outside your door.

Most zombie stories, the problems they solve are not the actual zombies. The problems they solve are the human interactions.

It's inevitable your environment will influence what you do.

All the films I've done have had a secret commentary on stereotypical mentalities.

The moment you have massive social and political commentary trying to explain a phenomenon, then you know we are no longer dealing with a strictly psychiatric question.

You don't want to be ungenerous toward people who give you prizes, but it is never the social or political message that interests me in a novel. I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.

Art imitates life. Life imitates high school.

History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction. Most people recognize that novelists do research to get the facts right - how a glove factory works, for example, or how courtesans in imperial Japan dressed.

I think that crime is a good vehicle for looking at society in general because the nature of the crime novel means that you draw on a wide group of social possibilities.

My work generally tends to be an all-out, 360-degree subversive take on everything, most of all my own notion of myself as a son, father, husband, human being and male in this culture.