A Quote by Elif Batuman

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.

Elif Batuman

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Always Before Even Good Good Idea Had Idea Lot Novels Read Very Very Good Wanted Were Write

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Elif Batuman
American - Author
Born: 1977

My first attraction to writing novels was the plot, that almost extinct animal. Those novels I read which made me want to be a novelist were long, always plotted, novels - not just Victorian novels, but also those of my New England ancestors: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

John Irving

I think there's a false division people sometimes make in describing literary novels, where there are people who write systems novels, or novels of ideas, and there are people who write about emotional things in which the movement is character driven. But no good novels are divisible in that way.

Dana Spiotta

I had wanted to write English crime novels based on the American hard-boiled style, and for the first two novels about Brixton, the critics didn't actually know I was Irish.

Ken Bruen

People lose it when I say this, but I'm a novelist who doesn't read novels. There are lots of good reasons for not reading novels! I'm also a game writer who doesn't play games - I keep everything very separate. The only crossover with me is comics. I write them, and I read them passionately.

Karen Traviss

I was 35, had always wanted to write novels, and thought that I had better do it while I was young enough.

Diana Gabaldon

Well, writing was what I wanted to do, it was always what I wanted to do. I had novels to write so I wrote them.

Octavia E. Butler

We've had science fiction novels where China is dominant; we've had novels where India is dominant, and I suppose it's all about getting away from that cliched old tired idea that the future belongs to the West.

Alastair Reynolds

I had never read Victorian novels before going overseas. I read a handful of authors, but I had not immersed myself in the literature of the 19th century.

Eleanor Catton

There're no novels that I like to read so I write my own novels, and then I read them again, and it's the best thing.

Willow Smith

I first told the idea to an editor I had met who, after reading one of my novels for adults that was set in a high school, had an idea that I might write something for children.

Daniel Handler

I really had wanted to learn Italian for a long time. I think ever since - or even maybe even before I had read Dante. And I just sort of had this idea that I wanted to read Dante in Italian. And then in my office, we actually had a class - an Italian class.

Ann Goldstein

I write my novels personally, desperately and non-negligently. When I write my novels, I think about my novels only, and never do other works.

Haruki Murakami

I've always had the wish, the nostalgia to be able to write detective novels. At heart, the principal themes of detective novels are close to the things that obsess me: disappearance, the problems of identity, amnesia, the return to an enigmatic past.

Patrick Modiano

When I was one day old, I learned how to read. When I was two days old, I started to write. By the time I was three, I had finished 212 short stories, 38 novels, 730 poems, and one very funny limerick, all before breakfast.

Jon Scieszka

I've been thinking a lot about why it was so important to me to do The Idiot as a novel, and not a memoir. One reason is the great love of novels that I keep droning on about. I've always loved reading novels. I've wanted to write novels since I was little. I started my first novel when I was seven.I don't have the same connection to memoir or nonfiction or essays. Writing nonfiction makes me feel a little bit as if I'm producing a product I don't consume - it's a really alienating feeling.

Elif Batuman

When I am writing novels I don't read a lot of novels so I try to catch up in-between.

Salman Rushdie

A Quote by Elif Batuman

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