Orhan Pamuk Quotes
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.
The only antidote to the loneliness of the streets was the streets themselves.
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.
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.
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.
The gap between compassion and surrender is love’s darkest, deepest region.
We read novels because we want to see the world through other experiences, other beings, other eyes, other cultures.
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.
The thing that binds us together is that we have both lowered our expectations of life
I asked him about his enemies. He began to count them. The list went on and on...." - Conversations with Yahya Kemal
Women kill themselves because they hope to gain something, " said Kadife. "Men kill themselves because they've lost hope of gaining anything.
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.
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
Where there is a true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity.
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.
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.
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.
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?
We're not stupid! We're just poor! And we have a right to insist on this distinction
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.
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?
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.
Einstein...even failed physics once, but he'd never thought of giving up school to make a living.
After all, a woman who doesn't love cats is never going to be make a man happy.
Despite the loss they were suffering, they'd both relaxed - as people do when they realize they've run out of chances for happiness
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.
...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.
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.
Remembering the past always comes with an image or a view attached.
As much as I live I shall not imitate them or hate myself for being different to them
The writer's secret is not inspiration - for it is never clear where it comes from - it is his stubbornness, his patience.
What we essentially want is to draw something unknown to us in all its shadowiness, not something we know in all its illumination.
The greatest happiness is when the eye discovers beauty where neither then mind conceived of nor the hand intended any.
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.
