Elif Batuman Quotes

Really, I've worked my whole adult life at fiction, to try and write fiction.

I did not set out to write another novel. One day I sat down with the thought of trying my hand at a piece of nonfiction, a personal memoir of youth, but over the next several weeks, without intending it, the work began evolving into what has become 'Tomcat in Love.'

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

I started writing because I wanted to write scripts, but I wasn't very good at it. Then I started writing short stories, sort of as treatments for the film scripts, and I found I enjoyed writing short stories far more than I enjoyed writing film scripts. Then the short stories got longer and longer and suddenly, I had novels.

Nothing, I find, has prepared me for the sight of my own characters walking about. A playwright or screenwriter must expect it; a novelist doesn't and naturally concludes that she has gone mad.

As long as you have ideas, you can keep going. That's why writing fiction is so much fun: because you're moving people about, and making settings for them to move in, so there's always something there to keep working on.

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.

For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.

I've lost much of my heart and the spark or fire that once 'created,' or produced, the art of fiction.

All of my novels are seeded in real life events, and 'The Wreckage' is no different.

I loved writing fiction. I mean, once I found the character, or the characters, and knew who they were and knew their back-stories, it really - I mean, I went into my studio every day, thinking, 'What's gonna happen to Billy today?'

I do write a lot from personal experience, but I also embellish a bit.

I get ideas for my books from people I know and what happens to them, from places I've been and what happens to me, and from things I read.

When I was in my late twenties, a friend suggested that, since I was an avid SF reader and had been since I was barely a teenager, that since it didn't look like the poetry was going where I wanted, I might try writing a science fiction story. I did, and the first story I ever wrote was 'The Great American Economy.'

My novels aren't really generated by a single conceptual spark; it's more a process of many different elements that come together unexpectedly over a long period of time.

You're on your own with the book. And while you are writing fiction, you're spending all this time with people who don't actually exist, which is just madness.

Being a novelist, you can roam around with a story and indulge yourself.

What I write about in my novels is also what's in my life.

My books aren't autobiographical.

I'm a competent novelist. I'm getting better. But I'm a really good short story writer.

The more fiction you read and write, the more you'll find your paragraphs forming on their own.

I write novels and other things.

The move to creating stories was a natural progression for me, but the most pivotal time was probably in 6th grade: That year, a friend introduced me to the stories of Ray Bradbury, and a student teacher introduced me to creative writing.