Orhan Pamuk Quotes

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.

I do not believe in a personal connection to God; that's where it gets transcendental.

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.

My religion is complicated. Literature is my true religion. After all, I come from a completely non-religious family.

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.

I want to describe the psychological state of the people in a certain city.

I really don't want to portray the Islamists as simply evil, the way it's often done in the west.

There's been quite a clear upswing in nationalist sentiments. Everyone is talking about it, in Turkey as well.

How different from the cosy world of Rüya's detective novels, where authors never vexed a hero with more signs than he needed.

I have hired a bodyguard, on the recommendation of my friends and the government. It's outrageous, having to live like this.

Morality is probably the last thing one can learn from football.

Enjoyment of football is part of the social context, and I have lost my faith in this social context.

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.

Nationalism stems from catastrophes, whether they are caused by earthquakes or lost wars.

Age had not made him less handsome, as is so often the case; it had simply made him less visible.

Immersing oneself in the problems of a book is a good way to keep from thinking of love.

I very much enjoy reading other writers' diaries, mainly because it makes me ask myself: Are they like you? How do they think?

I don’t like to make strong statements. I want to write strong novels … I keep my deep radical things for my novels.

What was venerated as style was nothing more than an imperfection or flaw that revealed the guilty hand.

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.

The greatest happiness is when the eye discovers beauty where neither then mind conceived of nor the hand intended any.

Where there is a true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity.

We read novels because we want to see the world through other experiences, other beings, other eyes, other cultures.

...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.

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.

Remembering the past always comes with an image or a view attached.

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.

The only antidote to the loneliness of the streets was the streets themselves.

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.

Despite the loss they were suffering, they'd both relaxed - as people do when they realize they've run out of chances for happiness

Women kill themselves because they hope to gain something, " said Kadife. "Men kill themselves because they've lost hope of gaining anything.

Einstein...even failed physics once, but he'd never thought of giving up school to make a living.

What we essentially want is to draw something unknown to us in all its shadowiness, not something we know in all its illumination.

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.

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.

…he quit drinking coffee, and naturally, his brain stopped working.

Those who can truly see, know.

The essential reason for my loneliness is that I don't even know where I belong.

It's not the content, but the form of thought that counts.

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.

Contrary to what is commonly believed, all murderers are men of extreme faith rather than unbelievers.

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

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.

I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darknness.

The sea was as dark as dreams and as deep as sleep.

It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn't know it.

I asked him about his enemies. He began to count them. The list went on and on...." - Conversations with Yahya Kemal

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?

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.

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.