QUOTES by Orhan Pamuk
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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.
Quote by -Orhan Pamuk
When I write, I feel that I'm writing with my intellect. When I paint, I think it's some other force making me paint. I - as I wrote in my novel 'My Name is Red' - watch with amazement what my hand is doing on the paper, what kind of line, what kind of strange, beautiful thing it's doing in spite of my will, so to speak.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -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.
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I have been attacked in Turkey more for my interviews than for my books. Political polemicists and columnists do not read novels there.
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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.
Quote by -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.
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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.
Quote by -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.'
Quote by -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.
Quote by -Orhan Pamuk
At first my publisher had reservations about publishing it in the form you are familiar with.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -Orhan Pamuk
The opponents of this process have always tried to vilify westernization as a poor imitation.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -Orhan Pamuk
I see Turkey's future as being in Europe, as one of many prosperous, tolerant, democratic countries.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -Orhan Pamuk
The hero of the book does long to experience God. But his conception of God is very western.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -Orhan Pamuk
I really don't want to portray the Islamists as simply evil, the way it's often done in the west.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -Orhan Pamuk
I write because I have an innate need to. I write because I can't do normal work. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can partake of real life only by changing it.
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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.
Quote by -Orhan Pamuk
When I paint, I definitely live in the present, like someone in a shower whistling or singing.
Quote by -Orhan Pamuk
There's been quite a clear upswing in nationalist sentiments. Everyone is talking about it, in Turkey as well.
Quote by -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.
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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.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -Orhan Pamuk
The fueling of anti-Turkish sentiment in Europe is resulting in an anti-European, indiscriminate nationalism in Turkey.
Quote by -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.
Quote by -Orhan Pamuk
Istanbul is a vast place. There are very conservative neighbourhoods, there are places that are upper class, Westernised, consuming Western culture.
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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.
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Culture is mix. Culture means a mix of things from other sources. And my town, Istanbul, was this kind of mix. Istanbul, in fact, and my work, is a testimony to the fact that East and West combine cultural gracefully, or sometimes in an anarchic way, came together, and that is what we should search for.
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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.
Quote by -Orhan Pamuk