Elif Batuman Quotes

I find Spike Jones' movies to be really very inventive and funny, but they're really sad and touching and really key into the different facets of the human experience.

David Mamet's writing is pretty spectacular, obviously. I like the honesty of it; I like how funny it is and how sad it is.

I always really loved Russian literature, and I think Tolstoy's writing is full of a sense of melancholy and humanity, so it seems really modern.

I fell in love with 19th-century Russian plays.

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 longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.

I can see the humorous side of things and enjoy the fun when it comes; but look where I will, there seems to me always more sadness than joy in life.

Some really good things kind of swing both ways and I like to see people that can swing really, really, really sad and horrible and terrible and really, really, really beautiful and funny.

I love 'Anna Karenina.' It's in the top five books on my list. Tolstoy is unsurpassed in combining the grand with the trivial, that is, the small details which make up life.

I don't sit down to write a funny story. Every single thing I sit down to write is meant to be sad.

Everything's complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness.

There's a rule of writing: if everything is funny, nothing is funny; if everything is sad, nothing is sad. You want that contrast.

When I was growing up, 'Anna Karenina' was one of my favourite books.

What I think is funny is when people, despite tragic situations, are still hopeful, still trying. It's sweet and sad - and, to me, hilarious.

If you want to reach any kind of poignancy or meaning a lot of times, coming from comedy is the best way to get there.

Funny and sad are two sides of the same coin. I think that most comedians are able to tap into deep subject matter.

Different things made 'Cheers' and 'Frasier' special. Both of them, though, were honest. It was the old Shakespeare thing: Hold the mirror up to life.

Humor without sadness underneath it feels cheap and aggressive.

I don't like 'comedy,' I like 'life,' which has everything in it.

That's what sort of fascinates me - what's funny as well as what's sad.

I love 19th-century Russian literature, the avant garde, the Soviet period.

By the 1880s, English translations of both the French and the Russian editions were available, and Americans began to read 'War and Peace.'

The source of all humor is not laughter, but sorrow.

Comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness.

In the summer of 1866, as Leo Tolstoy prepared for his serialized novel 'War and Peace' to be published as a single volume, he wrote to illustrator Mikhail Bashilov, hoping to commission drawings for the new edition of the novel, which he referred to by its original title,1805.