A Quote by Elif Batuman

As a novelist, you write about social mores, but not everything can be explained.

Elif Batuman

Quote Topics

About Everything Explained Novelist Social Write

Quote Author

Elif Batuman
American - Author
Born: 1977

Horror writers can write about everything in the real world that a mainstream novelist can--plus the supernatural, which is the most fertile field for metaphor imaginable.

Bentley Little

Humans become human through intense learning not just of survival skills but of customs and social mores, kinship and social laws-that is, culture.

Richard Leakey

When cubism began to take a social form, Metzinger was especially talked about. He explained cubism, while Picasso never explained anything. It took a few years to see that not talking was better than talking too much.

Marcel Duchamp

Nobody in France would ever say 'He's a Jewish novelist' or 'She's a black novelist,' even though people do write about those subjects. It would look absurd to a French person to go into a bookstore and see a 'Gay Studies' section.

Edmund White

If it's between s'mores and cotton candy, I'm gonna have to go s'mores all the way... but in truth, I'm a gummy bears guy.

Ryan Paevey

If anything were FULLY explained, everything would be explained.

Christian Friedrich Hebbel

One's politics are part of one even when one is writing. But if I want to say anything about the state of civil society, I will write an essay. The responsibilities you feel as a novelist are literary ones, I think, not civic ones. And I think politicians are interesting to write about.

Thomas Mallon

I considered mores to be one of the great general causes responsible for the maintenance of a democratic republic . . . the term "mores" . . . meaning . . . habits of the heart.

Alexis de Tocqueville

One thing I knew about the novelist’s task: when in doubt, write; when empty, write; when afraid, write. Nothing is more impenetrable than the blank page. The blank page is the void, the absence of sense and feeling, the white light of literary death.

Philip Sington

I'm a novelist first, and I wrote a bunch of books, and everything I write, I just find people are more interesting when there's an element of humor to it.

Jonathan Tropper

The preoccupation of the novelist: how to capture the living moments, was answered by the diary. You write while you are alive. You do not preserve them in alcohol until the moment you are ready to write about them.

Anais Nin

I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.

Julian Barnes

Only a great genius like the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell can be mother, wife and novelist without solitude. I couldn't write until my youngest child went to school, and then I began - the first morning - and I've never stopped.