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We live but for a short time, we see but very little, and we know almost nothing; so, at least, let's do some dreaming. Have yourself a very good Sunday, my dear readers. -- Orhan Pamuk
She looked out the window; in her eyes was the light that you see only in children arriving at a new place, or in young people still open to new influences, still curious about the world because they have not yet been scarred by life. -- Orhan Pamuk
If we give what we treasure most to a Being we love with all our hearts, if we can do that without expecting anything in return, then the world becomes a beautiful place. -- Orhan Pamuk
In a city where men are killing each other like animals just to make it a happier place, who has the right to stop me from killing myself? -- Orhan Pamuk
The beauty and mystery of this world only emerges through affection, attention, interest and compassion ... open your eyes wide and actually see this world by attending to its colors, details and irony. -- Orhan Pamuk
Istanbul is certainly in the process of transforming itself into an attractive cultural, tourist and financial center. But there are also millions of sad stories in this giant sea of immigration, poverty, misery and contradictions. So much anger, frustration and fury. -- Orhan Pamuk
The essential reason for my loneliness is that I don't even know where I belong. -- Orhan Pamuk
I consider myself a person who comes from a Muslim culture. In any case, I would not say that I'm an atheist. So I'm a Muslim who associates historical and cultural identification with this religion. -- Orhan Pamuk
Humanity has one strength that no one has: that is we may feel the feelings, pain, jealousy, failure, love, happiness of others and identify with them, and even see the world through their own eyes. -- Orhan Pamuk
I came across humanity in Istanbul, and all I know about life comes from Istanbul, and definitely, I am writing about Istanbul. I also love the city because I live there, it has formed me, and it's me. Of course it is natural. If somebody lived all his life in Delhi, he will write about Delhi. -- Orhan Pamuk
Let us say in the pocket of one of my old coats I find a movie ticket from many years ago. Once I see the ticket, not only do I remember that I saw this movie, but also scenes from this movie, which I think I have entirely forgotten, come back to me. Objects have this power, and I like it. -- Orhan Pamuk
I work seven days a week, from 9 in the morning till 8 at night. I have the titles of the next eight novels I want to write. I feel myself pitiable, degraded on a day that I don't write. -- Orhan Pamuk
I believe strongly in an author's moral responsibility. But his first obligation is to write good books. -- Orhan Pamuk
The first thing I learned at school was that some people are idiots; the second thing I learned was that some are even worse. -- Orhan Pamuk
When we lose people we love, we should never disturb their souls, whether living or dead. Instead. we should find consolation in an object that reminds you of them, something ... I don't know ... even an earring -- Orhan Pamuk
Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight. -- Orhan Pamuk
What is it to be a color? Color is the touch of the eye, music to the deaf, a word out of the darkness. -- Orhan Pamuk
When the whole world reads your books, is there any other happiness for a writer? I am happy that my books are read in 57 languages. But I am focused on Istanbul not because of Istanbul but because of humanity. Everyone is the same in the end. -- Orhan Pamuk
Now everyone is prouder and poorer -- Orhan Pamuk
We read novels because we want to see the world through other experiences, other beings, other eyes, other cultures. -- Orhan Pamuk
They were able to deduce from his reports that the sharbat was poisonous to Turks but not to Kurds; however, because of the official state position that Kurds and Turks are indistinguishable, they kept this conclusion to themselves. -- Orhan Pamuk
My dark beloved, my troubled hero, were you unable to sleep for thinking of me the whole night? Is that why the blush has left your face? -- Orhan Pamuk
These were innocent people, so innocent that they thought poverty a crime that wealth would allow them to forget.
from the notebooks of Celal Salik -- Orhan Pamuk
It's not the content, but the form of thought that counts. -- Orhan Pamuk
I had the feeling that focusing on objects and telling a story through them would make my protagonists different from those in Western novels - more real, more quintessentially of Istanbul. -- Orhan Pamuk
I always think that it's wrong to put images of my protagonists on the cover of my novels because readers can identify with characters only if they are given the chance to imagine them independently. -- Orhan Pamuk
I have always thought that the place where you sleep or the place you share with your partner should be separate from the place where you write. The domestic rituals and details somehow kill the imagination. They kill the demon in me. -- Orhan Pamuk
Well, on the one hand the Turks have the legitimate need to defend their national dignity - and this includes being recognized as a part of the west and Europe. -- Orhan Pamuk
Expressing one's reality in words, as truthful as they might be, goads one to insincerity. -- Orhan Pamuk
If we go to Frankfurt together it won't be long, I'm sure, before I love you. I'm not like you; it takes me longer than two days to fall in love with someone. If you're patient, if you don't break my heart with your Turkish jealousies, I'll love you deeply. -- Orhan Pamuk
But in my rebellious way I think that people have to be able to start over, just as I believed that a little girl has to be able to stay an innocent child her whole life long if she wants to, -- Orhan Pamuk
We should not judge Islam by terrorists. All civilizations and cultures produce terrorists. Every time there is a flag-burning, killing, or provocative films, I'm worried, not because something radical will happen, and this time, some people are killed. We're very sorry for that. -- Orhan Pamuk
Although everyone knew it as freedom from the laws of Islam, no one was quite sure what else westernization was good for. -- Orhan Pamuk
Contrary to what is commonly believed, all murderers are men of extreme faith rather than unbelievers. -- Orhan Pamuk
Maybe you've understood by now that for men like myself, that is, melancholy men for whom love, agony, happiness and misery are just excuses for maintaining eternal loneliness, life offers neither great joy nor great sadness. -- Orhan Pamuk
It may not happen in the first instant, but within ten minutes of meeting a man, a woman has a clear idea of who he is, or at least who he might be for her, and her heart of hearts has already told her whether or not she's going to fall in love with him. -- Orhan Pamuk
It's important, no doubt, to understand the person we love. If we cannot manage this, it's necessary, at least, to believe we understand them. I must confess that over the entire eight years I only rarely enjoyed the contentment of the second possibility, let alone the first. -- Orhan Pamuk
In the mornings I used to say goodbye to my wife like someone going to work. I'd leave the house, walk around a few blocks, and come back like a person arriving at the office. -- Orhan Pamuk
I am a highly disciplined person. I get up at seven every morning and, still in my pajamas, sit down at my desk where my checkered ring binders and my fountain pen are ready for use. I try to write two pages every day. -- Orhan Pamuk
When I was publishing my first books, the previous generation of authors was fading away, so I was welcomed because I was a new author. -- Orhan Pamuk
I have hired a bodyguard, on the recommendation of my friends and the government. It's outrageous, having to live like this. -- Orhan Pamuk
I sometimes joke that I am the first writer of historical fiction who can look out his window and point to the objects in his novels. I have a view of the entrance to the Bosporus, the old city, Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque. -- Orhan Pamuk
Nothing makes you happy in life except love... Neither the books you write or cites you see... I am very lonely... If I say that I want to be here in this city close to you until the end of my life would you believe me? -- Orhan Pamuk
People only tell lies when there is something they are terribly frightened of losing. -- Orhan Pamuk
As Ka would later write, it may have been now, as they were holding each other and weeping, that Ipek discovered something for the first time: To live in indecision, to waver between defeat and a new life, offered as much pleasure as pain. -- Orhan Pamuk
I write a world where everyone is partly right. -- Orhan Pamuk
After all, a woman who doesn't love cats is never going to be make a man happy. -- Orhan Pamuk
Where there is a true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity. -- Orhan Pamuk
I read a book one day and my whole life was changed. -- Orhan Pamuk
Writers like Pierre Loti, by contrast, make no secret of loving Istanbul and the Turkish people for the opposite reason: for the preservation of their eastern particularity and their resistance to becoming western. -- Orhan Pamuk
Happiness is holding someone in your arms and knowing you hold the whole world. -- Orhan Pamuk
Just as good books give me the joys of being alive, bad novels depress me, and as I notice this sentiment coming from the pages, I stop. I also do not hesitate to walk out of a movie house if the film is bad. -- Orhan Pamuk
Life can't be all that bad,' i'd think from time to time. 'Whatever happens, i can always take a long walk along the Bosphorus. -- Orhan Pamuk
'Snow' is my most popular book in the United States. But in Turkey, it was not as popular as 'My Name is Red,' or even 'The Museum of Innocence,' because the secular leaders didn't want this bourgeois Orhan trying to understand these head-scarf girls. -- Orhan Pamuk
Life is beautiful if you are on the road to somewhere -- Orhan Pamuk
To be left with only the trace of a memory is to gaze at an armchair that's still molded to the form of a love who has left never to return: It is to grieve, dear reader, it is to weep. -- Orhan Pamuk
Many great authors of the 19th century wrote under conditions of strict censorship. The great thing about the art of writing a novel, is that you can write about anything. All you have to say is that it's fiction. -- Orhan Pamuk
When a good poet is confronted with difficult facts that he knows to be true but also are inimical to poetry, he has no choice but to flee to the margins; it was ... this very retreat that allowed him to hear the hidden music that is the source of all art. -- Orhan Pamuk
Not a day passes when the eagle of dark depression doesn't take flight in my soul, said Sunay, infusing his words with mysterious pride. But I cannot catch myself. So hold yourself in. All's well that ends well. -- Orhan Pamuk
Clocks and calendars do not exist to remind us of the Time we've forgotten but to regulate our relations with others and indeed all of society, and this is how we use them. -- Orhan Pamuk
When you see a beautiful woman in the street, don't look at her hatefully as if you're about to kill her and don't exhibit excessive longing either; just give her a little smile, avert your eyes, and walk on [1974]. Taking -- Orhan Pamuk
Only vulgar people boast about how happy they are -- Orhan Pamuk
This, then, is how we first came across the fearsome secret history of turkey's mannequins. -- Orhan Pamuk
I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work. -- Orhan Pamuk
We don't need more museums that try to construct the historical narratives of a society, community, team, nation, state, tribe, company, or species. We all know that the ordinary, everyday stories of individuals are riches, more humane, and much more joyful. -- Orhan Pamuk
Believing that Sibel was saying these things to me to make me angry, I got angry. But this is not to say that the fury owed nothing to my partial awareness that she was right. -- Orhan Pamuk
The thing that binds us together is that we have both lowered our expectations of life -- Orhan Pamuk
Like most Turkish men of my world who entered into this predicament, I never paused to wonder what might be going on in the mind of the woman with whom I was madly in love, and what her dreams might be; I only fantasized about her. -- Orhan Pamuk
More than anything I am a novelist. But for me, an author's job is not only to create linguistically accomplished works. As an author I also want to stimulate discussion. -- Orhan Pamuk
In actuality, we don't look for smiles in pictures of bliss, but rather, for the happiness in life itself. Painters know this, but this is preciously what they cannot depict. That's why they substitute the joy of seeing for the joy of life. -- Orhan Pamuk
Self-hatred is OK. I have self-hatred, too. It's OK. What's bad is if you don't know how to get out of it, don't know how to manage it. Self-hatred is, in fact, a good thing if you can clearly see the mechanism of it, because it helps you to understand others. -- Orhan Pamuk
How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known? -- Orhan Pamuk
Idealism, unrealistic idealism, is always contrasted with the reality of the people, of the man in the street. The details of daily life are always more convincing than the political fantasies of the earlier generations. -- Orhan Pamuk
We used to be brothers and sisters here. Kurdish, did not know he was. Turkmenians, Germans, they all existed here but never were proud of it. That pride was only distributed by the powers who aimed to destroy Turkey. -- Orhan Pamuk
Let everyone know, I lived a very happy life. -- Orhan Pamuk
In order to find meaning and readerly pleasure in the universe the writer reveals to us, we feel we must search for the novel's secret center, and we therefore try to embed every detail of the novel in our memory, as if learning each leaf of a tree by heart. -- Orhan Pamuk
But no one believes in that way what he reads in a novel ... Oh yes they do. If only to see themselves as wise and superior and humanistic, they need to think of us as sweet and funny, and convince themselves that they sympathize with the way we are and even love us. -- Orhan Pamuk
You'll learn it all soon enough . . . You will see everything without being seen. You will hear everything but pretend that you haven't . . . You will walk for ten hours a day but feel like you haven't walked at all. -- Orhan Pamuk
The power of things inheres in the memories they gather up inside them, and also in the vicissitudes of our imagination, and our memory
of this there is no doubt. -- Orhan Pamuk
In a city, you can be alone in a crowd, and in fact what makes the city a city is that it lets you hide the strangeness in your mind inside its teeming multitudes. -- Orhan Pamuk
When a Westerner meets someone from a poor country, he feels deep contempt. He assumes that the poor man's head must be full of all the nonsense that plunged his country into poverty and despair. -- Orhan Pamuk
I am so fortunate to be red! I'm fiery. I'm strong. I know men take notice of me and that I cannot be resisted. -- Orhan Pamuk
What was venerated as style was nothing more than an imperfection or flaw that revealed the guilty hand. -- Orhan Pamuk
If you wanted to buy anything from Ligor, you'd lower a basket from your floor and then shout -- Orhan Pamuk
Love is the urgency to hold fast to another and to be together in the same place. It's the desire to keep the world out by embracing another. It is the yearning to find a safe harbor for the human soul. -- Orhan Pamuk
[N]othing is as surprising as life. Except for writing. Except for writing. Yes, of course, except for writing, the only consolation. -- Orhan Pamuk
It is not my intention to explain Turkey, its culture and its problems. My literature has a universal concern: I want to bring people and their emotions closer to my readers, not explain Turkish politics. -- Orhan Pamuk
Of course in Turkey I'm seen as being on the 'Western' side, criticised by the nationalists, criticised by the communitarians as not belonging. Even, sometimes, criticised for looking at my country through Western eyes. And in the Western media I'm portrayed as belonging to the East. -- Orhan Pamuk
The challenge is to lend conviction even to the voices which advocate views I find personally abhorrent, whether they are political Islamists or officers justifying a coup. -- Orhan Pamuk
I am proud to be a Turk, and to write in Turkish about Turkey - and to have been translated into about 40 languages. But I don't want to politicize things by dramatizing them. -- Orhan Pamuk
In a brutal country like ours, where human life is 'cheap', it's stupid to destroy yourself for the sake of your beliefs. Beliefs? High ideas? Only people in rich countries can enjoy such luxuries. -- Orhan Pamuk
I asked him about his enemies. He began to count them. The list went on and on ... - Conversations with Yahya Kemal -- Orhan Pamuk
The knowledge that she could learn to love a man had always meant more to her than loving him effortlessly, more even than falling in love, and that was why she now felt that she was on the threshold of a new life, a happiness bound to endure for a very long time. -- Orhan Pamuk
National consciousness is truly a miraculous thing. When I am not in Turkey I feel even more Turkish than in Istanbul. But when I'm home my European side becomes more apparent. -- Orhan Pamuk
Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among themselves, transforming my head into an orchestra pit where different musical instruments sounded out, and I would realize that I could endure this life because of these musicales going on in my head. -- Orhan Pamuk
I certainly see myself more as a craftsman than as an artist. -- Orhan Pamuk
For the traveler we see leaning on his neighbor is an honest and well-meaning man and full of melancholy, like those Chekhov characters so laden with virtues that they never know success in life. -- Orhan Pamuk
Heroic dreams are the consolation of the unhappy. After all, when people like us say we're being heroic, it usually means we're about to kill each other
or kill ourselves. -- Orhan Pamuk
But I think it must be easier for a girl to marry someone she doesn't know, because the more you get to know men, the harder it is to love them. -- Orhan Pamuk
Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space. -- Orhan Pamuk
The true collector's only home is his own museum. -- Orhan Pamuk
I was at the end of my tether when my first book was published. For eight years I didn't make a penny, I worked so hard, didn't drink, didn't enjoy life. -- Orhan Pamuk
I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well. -- Orhan Pamuk
Nothing can be as astounding as life. Except for writing. Yes, of course, except for writing, the sole consolation. -- Orhan Pamuk
Oscar Wilde always makes me smile - with respect and admiration. His short stories prove that it is possible to be both sarcastic, even cynical, but deeply compassionate. Just seeing the cover of one of Wilde's books in a bookshop makes me smile. -- Orhan Pamuk
A great painter does not content himself by affecting us with his masterpieces; ultimately, he succeeds in changing the landscape of our minds. Once -- Orhan Pamuk
Ka knew very well that life was a meaningless string of random incidents -- Orhan Pamuk
Ka found it very soothing: for the first time in years, he felt part of a family. In spite of the trials and responsibilities of what was called 'family', he saw now the joys of its unyielding togetherness, and was sorry not to have known more of it in his life. -- Orhan Pamuk
What was the difference between love and the agony of waiting? Like love, the agony of waiting began in the muscles and somewhere around the upper belly but soon spread out to the chest, the thighs, and the forehead, to invade the entire body with numbing force. -- Orhan Pamuk
A nation could change its way of life, its history, its technology, its art, literature, and culture, but it would never have a real chance to change its gestures. -- Orhan Pamuk
Sometimes I wonder what my interior actually is. A heart that goes pitter-patter and thoughts that glide by like little paper boats on flowing water, -- Orhan Pamuk
My home is attached to a study - in fact, my home is my study, and I have a little room to sleep in. I need to write looking onto the street or a landscape. Looking at reality from some distance gives me romantic visions. -- Orhan Pamuk
I think less than people think I do about politics. I care about writing. -- Orhan Pamuk
I always enjoy impersonating my characters in the first-person singular. -- Orhan Pamuk
My diary has its own kind of magic. It gives me the feeling of having accomplished something. On days when I don't have time for this, I feel tortured. -- Orhan Pamuk
It's everywhere," he said. "No matter where you go, it grabs you by the collar. -- Orhan Pamuk
The sea was as dark as dreams and as deep as sleep -- Orhan Pamuk
The drinking of coffee is an absolute sin! Our Glorious Prophet did not partake of coffee because he knew it dulled the intellect, caused ulcers, hernia and sterility; he understood that coffee was nothing but the Devil's ruse. -- Orhan Pamuk
I do know this much though: If a man resorts to wiles, guile and petty deceptions, it means he's nowhere near being in love. -- Orhan Pamuk
This book is concerned with fate. I -- Orhan Pamuk
At the heart of the novelist's craft lies an optimism which thinks that the knowledge we gather from our everyday experience, if given proper form, can become valuable knowledge about reality. -- Orhan Pamuk
I have been attacked in Turkey more for my interviews than for my books. Political polemicists and columnists do not read novels there. -- Orhan Pamuk
Whatever anybody says, the most important thing in life is to be happy. -- Orhan Pamuk
My decision to view the world through novels, as it were, which is a typically European way of looking at things, became a heavy burden for me. But I took it on consciously, even though it was torture for me. -- Orhan Pamuk
It was as if he were in a place that the whole world had forgotten; as if it were snowing at the end of the world. -- Orhan Pamuk
In fact, my entire childhood consisted of looking at photographs in which the viewer sees the ball behind the line, looking through the goal net, and the poor goalkeeper in front of the net. -- Orhan Pamuk
To derive pleasure from a novel is to enjoy the act of departing from words and transforming these things into images in our mind. -- Orhan Pamuk
Immersing oneself in the problems of a book is a good way to keep from thinking of love. -- Orhan Pamuk
There's a lot of pride involved in my refusal to believe in god. -- Orhan Pamuk
A museum should not just be a place for fancy paintings but should be a place where we can communicate our lives through our everyday objects. -- Orhan Pamuk
For me, Westernization is not about consuming fanciful goods; it's about a system of free speech, democracy, egalitarianism and respect for the people's rights and dignity. -- Orhan Pamuk
In his brilliant new book Pankaj Mishra reverses the long gaze of the West upon the East, showing modern history as it has been felt by the majority of the world's population from Turkey to China. These are the amazing stories of the grandfathers of today's angry Asians. Excellent! -- Orhan Pamuk
When there is not a breath of wind, the waters sometimes shudder as if from inside and take on the finish of washed silk. -- Orhan Pamuk
I'm not indignant," I said indignantly. -- Orhan Pamuk
The hero of the book does long to experience God. But his conception of God is very western. -- Orhan Pamuk
At the end of the day there was nothing to be gained by reminding people that everything that had ever been written, even the greatest and most authoritative texts in the world, were about dreams, not real life, dreams conjured up by words. -- Orhan Pamuk
I believe in a world where there are no heroes, and I've read and know humanity a lot. There are moments that I admire in a person courage, intellect, hard work. These are the qualities I admire in an intellectual, in a writer, and there are so many people who have these things. -- Orhan Pamuk
When I paint, I definitely live in the present, like someone in a shower whistling or singing. -- Orhan Pamuk
I strongly believe that the art of the novel works best when the writer identifies with whoever he or she is writing about. Novels in the end are based on the human capacity, compassion, and I can show more compassion to my characters if I write in a first person singular. -- Orhan Pamuk
Writing my own diary is the best form of remembrance, but only for my own use. I need these notes; it's like an impulse. -- Orhan Pamuk
I would be pleased if someone would invent a pill to remove my impatience, moodiness, and occasional bursts of anger. But if they did, I wouldn't be able to write my novels or paint. -- Orhan Pamuk
Only imbeciles are innocent. -- Orhan Pamuk
Painting taught literature to describe. -- Orhan Pamuk
It's a great relief for me that no one will ask me anymore: "Orhan, when will you get the Nobel Prize?" -- Orhan Pamuk
The urbanized life has lead to the destruction of the legends. -- Orhan Pamuk
Perhaps one day someone from a distant land will listen to this story of mine. Isn't this what lies behind the desire to be inscribed in the pages of a book? Isn't it just for the sake of this delight that sultans and viziers proffer bags of gold to have their histories written? -- Orhan Pamuk
This was a far cry from the meritocratic Ottoman period, when only by dint of an education could a man of humble background hope to rise through the ranks, get rich, and become a pasha. -- Orhan Pamuk
My fear, which I shared with everyone in the Turkish secular bourgeoisie, was not of God but of the fury of those who believed in Her too much. -- Orhan Pamuk
Every person has a star, every star has a friend, and for every person carrying a star there is someone else who reflects it, and everyone carries this reflection like a secret confidante in the heart. -- Orhan Pamuk
I was trying to think of something to say that would sound more meaningful, but when you get sown to it, words aren't very useful at baring our souls, they're just something else to hide behind. -- Orhan Pamuk
The ideal story should begin innocently like a fairy-tale, be frightening like a nightmare in the middle, and conclude sadly like a love story ending in separation. -- Orhan Pamuk
There's been quite a clear upswing in nationalist sentiments. Everyone is talking about it, in Turkey as well. -- Orhan Pamuk
A person could wish for one thing and speak of another, and their fate, their kismet, was the thing that could bring the two together. Even -- Orhan Pamuk
We fall in love more deeply when we're unhappy. -- Orhan Pamuk
Enjoyment of football is part of the social context, and I have lost my faith in this social context. -- Orhan Pamuk
Dogs do speak, but only to those who know how to listen. -- Orhan Pamuk
The entire world was like a palace with countless rooms whose doors opened into one another. We were able to pass from one room to the next only by exercising our memories and imaginations, but most of us, in our laziness, rarely exercised these capacities, and forever remained in the same room. -- Orhan Pamuk
I need a moment of time for myself every day, like a child playing with his things. When I travel, I routinely find a quiet place, open my diary and write something in it. -- Orhan Pamuk
We passed through forests of
fire, forded rivers of light and forged dark seas and mountains of snow and ice.
Each crossing took us thousands of years, though it seemed no more than the
blink of an eye. -- Orhan Pamuk
My childhood proved to me that there could be no enjoyment of football without community. But it becomes difficult when this community is having problems with its identity. That's when we experience all possible forms of nationalist exaggeration. -- Orhan Pamuk
In this night, pure and everlasting, like an old fairy tale, being Turkish felt infinitely better than being poor. -- Orhan Pamuk
I don't read newspapers in the morning. I take a look at the dailies in the afternoon, but only when I've finished my work for the day. Reading about what is happening in Turkey once again would only be demoralizing for me. -- Orhan Pamuk
First, I would find an object which I would think is suitable for my characters and stories, then write about it, and in the end, I ended up with a house full of thousands of objects. -- Orhan Pamuk
One side of me is very busy paying attention to the details of life, the humanity of people, catching the street voices, the middle-class, upper-middle-class secret lives of Turks. The other side is interested in history and class and gender, trying to get all of society in a very realistic way. -- Orhan Pamuk
Happiness means being close to the one you love, that's all. (Taking immediate possession is not necessary.) -- Orhan Pamuk
My religion is complicated. Literature is my true religion. After all, I come from a completely non-religious family. -- Orhan Pamuk
...love is deep attention, deep compassion... -- Orhan Pamuk
The truly great books are always novels: 'Anna Karenina,' 'The Brothers Karamazov,' 'The Magic Mountain.' Just as with 'Shahnameh,' I browse these books from time to time to remember how a great book works on us or to teach my students at Columbia University. -- Orhan Pamuk
For if a lover's face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home. -- Orhan Pamuk
East and West are coming together. Whether in peace or anarchy - they are coming together. There needn't be a clash between East and West, between Islam and Europe. -- Orhan Pamuk
I identify with my culture, but I am happy to be living on a tolerant, intellectual island where I can deal with Dostoyevsky and Sartre, both great influences for me. -- Orhan Pamuk
With the death of my father, it wasn't just the objects of everyday life that had changed; even the most ordinary street scenes had become irreplaceable mementos of a lost world whose every detail figured in the meaning of the whole. -- Orhan Pamuk
People who make fun of everything can never truly fall in love, nor truly believe in God. -- Orhan Pamuk
Before my birth there was infinite time, and after my death, inexhaustible time. I never thought of it before: I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darkness. -- Orhan Pamuk
I realized that the longing for art, like the longing for love, is a malady that blinds us, and makes us forget the things we already know, obscuring reality. -- Orhan Pamuk
A novelist is essentially a person who covers distance through his patience, slowly, like an ant. A novelist impresses us not by his demonic and romantic vision, but by his patience. -- Orhan Pamuk
These political movements flourish on the margins of Turkish society because of poverty and because of the people's feeling that they are not being represented. -- Orhan Pamuk
My unhappiness protects me from life. -- Orhan Pamuk
I wanted to tell a romantic and dark side of Ottoman history that was also slightly political, saying to the previous generation of writers, 'Look, I'm interested in Ottoman things, and I'm not afraid of it, and I'm doing something creative.' -- Orhan Pamuk
Any intelligent person knows that life is a beautiful thing and that the purpose of life is to be happy," said my father as he watched the three beauties. "But it seems only idiots are ever happy. How can we explain this? -- Orhan Pamuk
The real question is how much suffering we've caused our womenfolk by turning headscarves into symbols - and using women as pawns in a political game. -- Orhan Pamuk
In poetically well built museums, formed from the heart's compulsions, we are consoled not by finding in them old objects that we love, but by losing all sense of Time. -- Orhan Pamuk
My mood, as I identify with each of my heroes, resembles what I used to feel when I played alone as a child. Like all children, I liked to play make-believe, to put myself in someone else's place and imagine dream worlds in which I was a soldier, a famous soccer player, or a great hero. -- Orhan Pamuk
Try to discover who I am from my choice of words and colors, as attentive people like yourselves might examine footprints to catch a thief. -- Orhan Pamuk
I have the legacy of my father and his nocturnal automatic waking up. But I like those periods. I immediately have a different vision of humanity and my life. -- Orhan Pamuk
What we essentially want is to draw something unknown to us in all its shadowiness, not something we know in all its illumination. -- Orhan Pamuk
Are you an angel that approaching you should be so terrifying? -- Orhan Pamuk
An illustration that does not complement a story, in the end, will become but a false idol. Since we cannot possibly believe in an absent story, we will naturally begin believing in the picture itself. -- Orhan Pamuk
Colour is the touch of the eye,
Music to the deaf,
A word out of darkness. -- Orhan Pamuk
The waiting was torture, the worst Ka had ever known. It was this pain, this deadly wait, he now remembered, that had made him afraid to fall in love. -- Orhan Pamuk
Ka thought it strangely depressing that the suicide girls had had to struggle to find a private moment to kill themselves. Even after swallowing their pills, even as they lay quietly dying, they'd had to share their rooms with others. -- Orhan Pamuk
When another writer in another house is not free, no writer is free. -- Orhan Pamuk
Heaven was the place where you kept alive the dreams of your memories. -- Orhan Pamuk
At that moment, I wished my whole consciousness could be erased. I wanted to escape from my own awareness, to wander freely in a world outside my mind, but understanding now that I would always be two people, I realized that I'd never be able to let go. -- Orhan Pamuk
I don't much care whether rural Anatolians or Istanbul secularists take power. I'm not close to any of them. What I care about is respect for the individual. -- Orhan Pamuk
It's not enough to be oppressed, you must also be in the right. Most oppressed people are in the wrong to an almost ridiculous degree. What shall I believe in? -- Orhan Pamuk
The city's more beautiful at night, you know: the people of the night always tell the truth. -- Orhan Pamuk
At the age of 60, I am less experimental and more mature. I want most of all to convey my understanding of life. -- Orhan Pamuk
Without patience and the skill of a craftsman, even the greatest talent is wasted. -- Orhan Pamuk
Newer and more modern cemeteries, devoid of cypress trees or any other vegetation, were usually situated well outside the new quarters and surrounded by tall concrete walls, just like factories, military bases, and hospitals. -- Orhan Pamuk
The habit of collecting, of attachment to things, is an essential human trait. But Western civilization put collecting on a pedestal by inventing museums. Museums are about representing power. It could be the king's power or, later, people's power. -- Orhan Pamuk
Tell me then, does love make one a fool or do only fools fall in love? -- Orhan Pamuk
I get used to my fountain pens and my clothes, and I can never throw them away. I replace them only when I see that they are broken or embarrassing to wear. -- Orhan Pamuk
Yet does illustrating in a new way signify a new way of seeing? -- Orhan Pamuk
When we reach the point when our lives take on their final shape as in a novel we can identify our happiest moment selecting it in retrospective -- Orhan Pamuk
No one recognises the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it -- Orhan Pamuk
Turks have a dismissive phrase: he works like a clerk. I have turned this insult around: I am proud to say that I work like a clerk. -- Orhan Pamuk
Age had not made him less handsome, as is so often the case; it had simply made him less visible. -- Orhan Pamuk
A Good Education Removes the Barriers Between Rich and Poor -- Orhan Pamuk
Museums should no longer concern themselves with history on a grand scale, the sagas of kings and heroes, or the forging of national identities; they should focus instead on the lives and belongings of ordinary people, just as modern novels do. -- Orhan Pamuk
We're not stupid! We're just poor! And we have a right to insist on this distinction -- Orhan Pamuk
There are many ways to read a novel. We read sometimes logically, sometimes with our eyes, sometimes with our imagination, sometimes with a small part of our mind, sometimes the way we want to, sometimes the way the book wants us to, and sometimes with every fiber of our being. -- Orhan Pamuk
A letter doesn't communicate by words alone. A letter, just like a book, can be read by smelling it, touching it and fondling it. Thereby, intelligent folk will say, 'Go on then, read what the letter tells you!' whereas the dull-witted will say, 'Go on then, read what he's written! -- Orhan Pamuk
It's such a shame that we know so little about our own country, that we can't find it in our hearts to love our own kind. Instead we admire those who show our country disrespect and betray its people. -- Orhan Pamuk
Remembering the past always comes with an image or a view attached. -- Orhan Pamuk
As much as I live I shall not imitate them or hate myself for being different to them -- Orhan Pamuk
I think it's horrible that we Turks are always seen under the aspect of Islam first. I am constantly asked about religion, and almost always with a negative undercurrent that makes me furious. -- Orhan Pamuk
I wrote 'My Name is Red' just to remember painting, where the hand does it before the intellect. When I'm captive to it, I'm a happier person. Kierkegaard tells us that a happy person is someone who lives in the present; the unhappy person, someone who lives either in the past or the future. -- Orhan Pamuk
God loves some people more. Those people end up rich. He loves some people a little less, and those people stay poor. You take a pin and scratch off one of these colored circles, and underneath you'll find your gift and your fortune. -- Orhan Pamuk
Eventually, we come to love certain novels because we have expended so much imaginative labor on them. This is why we hang on to those novels, whose pages are creased and dog-eared. -- Orhan Pamuk
And before long , the msuic , the views rushing past the window , my fathers voice and the narrow cobblestone streets all merged into one , and it seemed to me that while we would never find answers to these fundamental questions , it was good for us to ask them anyway .
pg. 284 -- Orhan Pamuk
Life is short, and we should respect every moment of it. -- Orhan Pamuk
As soon as I observed myself from outside myself, I recognized and understood that I had a long-standing habit of keeping an eye on myself. That's how I managed to pull myself together, over the years, checking myself from the outside. -- Orhan Pamuk
Morality is probably the last thing one can learn from football. -- Orhan Pamuk
I sometimes feel nervous because I give stupid answers to certain pointless questions. It happens in Turkish as much as in English. I speak bad Turkish and utter stupid sentences. -- Orhan Pamuk
A miniaturist creates his art by heeding his conscience and by obeying the principles in which he believes, fearing nothing. he pays no attention to what his enemies, the zealots and those who envy him have to say. -- Orhan Pamuk
To read a novel is to wonder constantly, even at moments when we lose ourselves most deeply in the book: How much of this is fantasy, and how much is real? -- Orhan Pamuk
Women kill themselves because they hope to gain something," said Kadife. "Men kill themselves because they've lost hope of gaining anything. -- Orhan Pamuk
I consider myself Istanbul's storyteller. My subject matter is my town. I consider it my job to explore the hidden patterns of my city's clandestine corners, its shady, mysterious places, the things I love. -- Orhan Pamuk
Contrary to what the West seems to think, it is not poverty that brings people like us so close to God. It's the fact that no one is more curious than we are to learn why we are here on earth and what will happen to us in the next world. -- Orhan Pamuk
Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow. -- Orhan Pamuk
Dogs do speak, but only to those who listen -- Orhan Pamuk
But as nothing, western or local, came to fill the void, the great drive to westernize amounted mostly to the erasure of the past; the effect on culture was reductive and stunting, leading families like mine, otherwise glad of republican progress, to furnish their houses like museums. -- Orhan Pamuk
The gap between compassion and surrender is love's darkest, deepest region. -- Orhan Pamuk
Sometimes I would see them not as mementos of the blissful hours but as the tangible precious debris of the storm raging in my soul. -- Orhan Pamuk
Love points the way, empties you of the stuff of life, carries you at last to the mystery of creation. -- Orhan Pamuk
If the Americans would only take all the money they have spent on this war (Iraq), and spend it like Soros has done on civil societies in these countries, then in 10 years they would have wonderful results. -- Orhan Pamuk
The fueling of anti-Turkish sentiment in Europe is resulting in an anti-European, indiscriminate nationalism in Turkey. -- Orhan Pamuk
Every person had a star, every star had a friend, and for every person carrying a star there was someone else who reflected it, and everyone carried this reflection as a secret confidant in his heart. -- Orhan Pamuk
Those who can truly see, know. -- Orhan Pamuk
In the beginning the point was not to have a point, to escape the world in which everyone had to have a job, a desk, an office. -- Orhan Pamuk
Happiness is laughing together... -- Orhan Pamuk
If we love someone very much, we know that even if we give him the most valuable thing we have, we know not to expect harm from him. This is what a sacrifice is. Who -- Orhan Pamuk
I don't like to make strong statements. I want to write strong novels ... I keep my deep, radical things for my novels. -- Orhan Pamuk
Teacher. After becoming engaged to my grandfather, and before marrying him, she did something rather brave in Istanbul in 1917 - she went out with him to a restaurant. -- Orhan Pamuk
Istanbul is a vast place. There are very conservative neighbourhoods, there are places that are upper class, Westernised, consuming Western culture. -- Orhan Pamuk
Great changes in the direction of peace have often come from people who were no great advocates of peace to begin with. -- Orhan Pamuk
All great masters, in their work, seek that profound void within color and outside time. -- Orhan Pamuk
I want to describe the psychological state of the people in a certain city. -- Orhan Pamuk
The fictive structure, my work, my imagination, my books are about the details, the huge construction about culture, Islamic culture or modern Turkey. They're all intertwined. -- Orhan Pamuk
As always after drinking too much, I felt like my own ghost trying to take it's first solo walk outside the body. -- Orhan Pamuk
The greatest happiness is when the eye discovers beauty where neither then mind conceived of nor the hand intended any. -- Orhan Pamuk
The writer's secret is not inspiration - for it is never clear where it comes from - it is his stubbornness, his patience. -- Orhan Pamuk
Einstein ... even failed physics once, but he'd never thought of giving up school to make a living. -- Orhan Pamuk
Good fiction is about asserting the beauties of the world, inventing a new, positive thing. Where am I going to get that? And it should be original; it should not be cliched. So the way I looked at history was not to accuse it of failure. -- Orhan Pamuk
WHAT MAKES CITY LIFE MEANINGFUL IS THE THINGS WE HIDE. -- Orhan Pamuk
'The Museum of Innocence' is not about politics; it's a love story, but I think it's political in the sense that it wants to capture how a man suppresses a woman. -- Orhan Pamuk
What is the thing you want most from me? What can I do to make you love me?'
Be yourself,' said Ipek. -- Orhan Pamuk
Big proclamations about honor are really just excuses invented to let people kill each other with a clear conscience. -- Orhan Pamuk
If a writer is to tell his own story - tell it slowly, and as if it were a story about other people - if he is to feel the power of the story rise up inside him, if he is to sit down at a table and patiently give himself over to this art - this craft - he must first have been given some hope. -- Orhan Pamuk
If I see my city as beautiful and bewitching, then my life must be so too. -- Orhan Pamuk
Read them, read and learn, because there's so much to do, you know. -- Orhan Pamuk
Down your order. -- Orhan Pamuk
Let me first state forthright that contrary to what we've often read in books and heard from preachers, when you are a woman, you don't feel like the Devil. -- Orhan Pamuk
Language is me, in a way. Really, I feel it. -- Orhan Pamuk
What is the meaning of it all, of this ... of this world?
'Mystery', I heard in my thoughts, or perhaps, 'mercy', but I wasn't certain of either. -- Orhan Pamuk
Despite the loss they were suffering, they'd both relaxed - as people do when they realize they've run out of chances for happiness -- Orhan Pamuk
To appropriate an invention, be it artistic or technical, you have to have at least a part of your spirit embracing it so radically that you somehow change. -- Orhan Pamuk
I like all the disgusting things that are fine just being themselves. What's wrong with a little honest vulgarity? -- Orhan Pamuk
But just like believing in God, falling in love is such a sacred feeling that it leaves you with no room for any other passions. -- Orhan Pamuk
Love is the ability to make the invisible visible and the desire always to feel the invisible in one's midst. -- Orhan Pamuk
I see Turkey's future as being in Europe, as one of many prosperous, tolerant, democratic countries. -- Orhan Pamuk
When people read a novel 600 pages long, six months pass, and all they will remember are five pages. They don't remember the text - instead, they remember the sensations the text gives them. -- Orhan Pamuk
If the soulmate is absent there is no need for the soul -- Orhan Pamuk
It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn't know it. -- Orhan Pamuk
All the happiness and beauty that life had to offer only revealed themselves when his mind drifted off into fantasies of a world far removed from his own. -- Orhan Pamuk
Contrary to popular opinion, a man can shut love out if he wants to. But to do so, he must free himself not only from the woman who has bewitched him but also from the third person in the story, the ghost who has put temptation in his way. -- Orhan Pamuk
People look at me as sort of a diplomat for Turkey, which by nature, I'm not; I don't want to be. It's again about that playfulness. Being Turkey's voice or representative is not playful, it's not childlike; it makes me self-conscious, kills the child in me. -- Orhan Pamuk
If they spoke, it was in whispers -- Orhan Pamuk
Man's sentimental attachment to objects is one of life's greatest consolations. -- Orhan Pamuk
True literature is more than just a story someone has told. It must provide the reader with the essence of the world on a moral, philosophical and emotional level. -- Orhan Pamuk
There was something pretentious about politics when it was taken to extremes. -- Orhan Pamuk
The only antidote to the loneliness of the streets was the streets themselves. -- Orhan Pamuk
No one drives me into exile, not even the nationalists. -- Orhan Pamuk
Turkish football serves the cause of nationalism, but not of the nation. -- Orhan Pamuk
They, like me, like all of us, had, once upon a time, in a past so far away it seemed like heaven, caught by chance a glimpse of an inner essence, only to forget what it was. It was this lost memory that pained us, reduced us to ruins, though still we struggled to be ourselves. -- Orhan Pamuk
I think perhaps it is a generational thing. I talk to younger people and they say, Where is this melancholy city you talk about My Istanbul is a sunny place. -- Orhan Pamuk
I told him just so he wouldn't be fooled by the bright lights of Istanbul into thinking that life was somehow easy. -- Orhan Pamuk
I've never left Istanbul, never left the houses, streets, and neighborhoods of my childhood. -- Orhan Pamuk
It was in Cihangir that i first learned Istanbul was not an anonymous multitude of walled-in lives - a jungle of apartments where no one knew who was dead or who was celebrating what - but an archipelago of neighbourhoods in which everyone knew each other. -- Orhan Pamuk
From a very young age, I suspected there was more to my world than I could see: somewhere in the streets of Istanbul, in a house resembling ours, there lived another Orhan so much like me he could pass for my twin, even my double. -- Orhan Pamuk
To savour Istanbul's back streets, to appreciate the vines and trees that endow its ruins with accidental grace, you must, first and foremost, be a stranger to them. -- Orhan Pamuk
To write is to transform that inward gaze into words, to study the worlds into which we pass when we retire into ourselves, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy. -- Orhan Pamuk
ALIF: Painting brings to life what the mind sees, as a feast for the eyes.
LAM: What the eye sees in the world enters the painting to the degree that it serves the mind.
MIM: Consequently, beauty is the eye discovering in our own world what the mind already knows. -- Orhan Pamuk
I envy cornerstone in empty deserts, because they are themselves, and for the same reason I envy rocks in the hills, where man has never set foot, and trees in the valleys that man has ever seen. -- Orhan Pamuk
Novels are political because in them, we try to identify with people who are not like us. And, in that sense, I like the first-person singular because I have to imitate accurately the voice of someone who is not like me. The third-person singular gives me an authority over a character. -- Orhan Pamuk
I do not believe in a personal connection to God; that's where it gets transcendental. -- Orhan Pamuk
Am sometimes hard-pressed to explain why I've stayed, not only in the same place but in the same building. -- Orhan Pamuk
Love is good for the skin. -- Orhan Pamuk
If you think you are better than Stork, then by all means, get hold of me. -- Orhan Pamuk
Over time, jealousy becomes an element as indispensable as paint in the life of the master artist. -- Orhan Pamuk
I think novelists should be disciplined and self-imposed working hours. I work a lot, but I don't feel that I'm working. I always feel that there is a child in me, healthy, and I'm playing. -- Orhan Pamuk
I read somewhere that luck is not blind, just illiterate. Luck, I mused, is a palliative for those who don't know probability and statistics. -- Orhan Pamuk
Modernity means overabundance. We are living in the age of mass-produced objects, things that come without announcing themselves and end up on our tables, on our walls. We use them - most of us don't even notice them - and then they vanish without fanfare. -- Orhan Pamuk
I believe that it isn't victories but defeats that promote nationalism. -- Orhan Pamuk
My hero wants to belong too, but he doesn't want to give up all the things he came to value in the west. -- Orhan Pamuk
The past is always an invented land. -- Orhan Pamuk
Love is a sacred silence. -- Orhan Pamuk
Authoritarianism, an unrealistic occidental imagination - these issues will never be settled. Turkey will continue to take Europe as a model; it will continue to pursue its search for democracy. -- Orhan Pamuk
The snow reminded me of the beauty and mystery of creation, of the essential joy that is life. -- Orhan Pamuk
The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the bus driver. -- Orhan Pamuk
Snow reminds Ka of God! But I'm not sure it would be accurate. What brings me close to God is the silence of snow. -- Orhan Pamuk
The endless repetition of an ordinary miracle. -- Orhan Pamuk
Mankind's greatest error, the biggest deception of the past thousand years is this: to confuse poverty with stupidity. -- Orhan Pamuk
Nationalism stems from catastrophes, whether they are caused by earthquakes or lost wars. -- Orhan Pamuk
The secularists in Turkey haven't underestimated religion, they just made the mistake of believing they could control it with the power of the army alone. -- Orhan Pamuk
After all, isn't the purpose of the novel, or of a museum, for that matter, to relate our memories with such sincerity as to transform individual happiness into a happiness all can share? -- Orhan Pamuk
At first my publisher had reservations about publishing it in the form you are familiar with. -- Orhan Pamuk
The opponents of this process have always tried to vilify westernization as a poor imitation. -- Orhan Pamuk
I don't judge my characters. -- Orhan Pamuk
I don't want to be a tree; I want to be its meaning. -- Orhan Pamuk
so the knowledge of their presence remained, for the time being, strictly within the bounds of people's private thoughts, lying dormant in a corner of their minds like a secret language spoken only at home. -- Orhan Pamuk
In Europe the rich are refined enough to act as if they're not wealthy. That is how civilized people behave. If you ask me, being cultured and civilized is not about everyone being free and equal; it's about everyone being refined enough to act as if they were. Then no one has to feel guilty. -- Orhan Pamuk
Being a fiction writer makes you someone who works with irresponsibility. -- Orhan Pamuk
What makes the marvellous is its peculiar way of being ordinary; what makes the ordinary is its peculiar way of being marvellous. -- Orhan Pamuk
For a novel need not be full of sorrow just because its heroes are suffering. -- Orhan Pamuk
I really don't want to portray the Islamists as simply evil, the way it's often done in the west. -- Orhan Pamuk
I very much enjoy reading other writers' diaries, mainly because it makes me ask myself: Are they like you? How do they think? -- Orhan Pamuk
Painting and happiness. I would like my dear readers who have given close attention to my story and my fate to bear these two things in mind, as they are the genesis of my world. -- Orhan Pamuk
Actually, it's the other way round. In a poor country, the only consolation people can have is the one that comes from their beliefs. -- Orhan Pamuk
Don't worry - love that blooms this fast is just as fast to wither -- Orhan Pamuk
To know is to remember that you've seen.To see is to know without remembering. Thus painting is remembering the blackness. -- Orhan Pamuk
A writer in someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is. -- Orhan Pamuk
When something explosive is kept hidden away, a tension builds within that must ultimately be released. -- Orhan Pamuk
Football can teach us that although a team's individual players may be weak, it can still be successful if it uses common sense. Or that we should not attack anyone physically when we suffer a depressing defeat. -- Orhan Pamuk
Museums are western inventions where the rich and the powerful or the government and the state tend to exhibit the signs and symbol and images of their culture. -- Orhan Pamuk
The task of writing a novel is to imagine a world
a world that first exists as a picture before it eventually takes the form of words. Only later do we express through words the picture we imagine, so that readers can share this product of the imagination. -- Orhan Pamuk
Where there's a lot of money to be made, there's also a lot of blood to be spilled. -- Orhan Pamuk
Censorship should never be allowed. One should be able to say anything. But I refuse to let politics be foisted on me. -- Orhan Pamuk
To avoid disappointment in art, one mustn't treat it as a career. -- Orhan Pamuk
He could sense the darkness inside him looking for an excuse to manifest itself. -- Orhan Pamuk
It's very gratifying to me to see my works bringing people closer to my country. -- Orhan Pamuk