Listing and counting have a spooky, magical power, and the holiday season is a spooky, magical time.

Why is there an end of the year? Because the calendar imposes numerical order on time. There is a natural fitness in the celebration of the New Year, a holiday of numbers imposed on things, with lists, as well as with Advent calendars and songs like 'The Twelve Days of Christmas.'

Lists are based on realism - on the coldly contemplated finitude of resources.

The first time I held an African drum in my hands was at Koc University in a forest in the northern suburbs of Istanbul.

When I was growing up, many of my relatives had never seen a black person before. Today, hundreds, maybe thousands of Africans live in Istanbul's old city alone. It's hard to imagine their lives in their human totality.

Anyone who has ever tried to plot a detective mystery knows that the hardest thing to come up with is motive.

Every time a meteor comes close to the earth, we all think about the end of the world - but our internal soundtrack doesn't turn off. We're also thinking about pizza or passing a slow tractor or making a turn, and for a magical instant, our lives seem to be in conversation with the stars.

The Himalayan glaciers, China's trade surplus, Olympic ice hockey - the world is full of pressing subjects that people never consult me about.

Soccer is taken extremely seriously in Turkey.

There's a lot to be said for an American-style liberal-arts education, which prevents young people from professionalizing right away.

I like a novel to have a certain amount of dead time and filler - unremarkable scenery, descriptions of getting from point A to point B, dialogue in which not much is said - in between the parts that are electric. With a long work that you don't read in one sitting, I think that makes for the best reading experience.

I had wanted to write 'The Possessed' as fiction, but everyone told me that no one would read a novel about graduate students. It seems almost uncivilized to tell someone writing a novel, 'No, you have to call this a memoir.'

I love the novelist's freedom of going into different people's subjectivity and being able to work with them as characters.

I'm Turkish-American; I was a freshman at Harvard in 1995 and 96. I did teach English in Hungary in the summer of 1996. I'm an autobiographical writer in the sense that whether in fiction or nonfiction, the issues and relationships and phenomena and problems I'm most interested in exploring are the ones I've experienced personally.

Many books have changed my life, but only one has the word 'life-changing' in the title: Marie Kondo's 'The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying.'

Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time,' especially 'Time Regained,' made me think differently about what the novel is and can do. Then I forgot about it, then reread it and remembered again.

I actually really wish I had written 'The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying' as an unreliably narrated novel that is also a self-help book.

I don't believe in being ashamed about not having read things.

No time you spend writing will be wasted - even if you write something that's bad.

It's important not to censor yourself and not to get upset or demoralized when you write bad stuff.

The one text that most changed my opinion on criticism was probably Freud's 'Interpretation of Dreams,' which I read in college.

The first modern novel was already a product, even an expression, of negative criticism: 'Don Quixote' contains a quite explicit critique of the chivalric romance and its insufficiency to account for the way real life feels when you get up in the morning in 17th-century Spain.

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.

The novel is like a melancholy form. It's about some kind of disillusionment with the way things are versus the idea of how they could be or how they used to be.

The problems in the Russian novel are quite similar to the problems of Turkish nationalism and Turkish culture, which was something that I grew up thinking didn't affect me very much because my parents didn't really talk about it.

Even in novels where the love relationship isn't the focus, I feel like it's often there, and the background is some barometer of whether this is a happy or sad story or whether this is a successful or unsuccessful life.

When in doubt, it is better to do the less conservative thing and to err on the side of the more colorful, possibly terrible mistake. That comes from thinking of yourself as a writer.

If you are in a breakup, you might as well go all the way and spend the summer in Samarkand, with no air-conditioning, learning a language you have no use for. At least it adds some romance to a depressing situation.

By the time I got to college, the Cold War was basically over.

A lot of fiction doesn't answer a question that any reasonable person would ever ask.

The book that made me decide to go into Russian literature was 'Anna Karenina,' which I first read in high school. The thing that appealed to me and constituted its Russianness for me was that it was simultaneously incredibly funny and sad.

I've developed this love of trashy Russian literature. There's a women's detective series that I was obsessed with for a while, written by Aleksandra Marinina, the former chief of police.

The dominant question for us with regard to literature has become, 'What does this have to do with me, with life as I know it?' That's the question answered by all these books about how Proust was actually a neuroscientist or how Proust can teach you emotional intelligence.

Imagination is really dependent on memory and observation, these things that we think of as part of nonfiction writing, actually.

You can't invent something you have no epistemological access to. In a way, it's all recombination.

There are very few things that I have any patience for that are not at least a little bit humorous.

It's kind of an embarrassing story - that's why it's called 'The Idiot.' But looking back at your past self, you see that this person had reasons for everything she did. There's a whole lot of awkwardness, but really, what should one be embarrassed about?

It's so embarrassing and painful to be young.

People don't become writers because they love having spontaneous, real-world interactions with living people as bodies with clothes in time.

There is this way that I felt when I was younger that we were beyond history and we were all citizens of the world that now seems so naive.

When you walk around, you have all this stuff rattling around in your head, things that have happened to you, things you have read. Life is just life, and you get what you get out of it.

When you started looking at the life of Tolstoy, there was so much passion and anger and drama surrounding him.

To think of Tolstoy eating a sandwich is intrinsically kind of funny.

You base your actions on a projected ending, which you actually don't know. However, when you reach the crucial point, and the pinnacle event doesn't occur, you just need to go on, and something else will happen.

I find something very appealing about taking literature very literally.

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

Being in a heterosexual relationship for a woman is always implicitly a little bit humiliating.

A lot of what I write is very personal.

My family is not only not religious, but my parents are both - they're secularists. My father is actually an atheist and feels very strongly about it.

I think it is true that when we're older, we realize the way that people act is... you know, everyone's kind of talking off the cuff, and everyone's, you know, spitballing sometimes.