Words matter. These are the best Orhan Pamuk Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
We fall in love more deeply when we’re unhappy.
I think less than people think I do about politics. I care about writing.
There’s been quite a clear upswing in nationalist sentiments. Everyone is talking about it, in Turkey as well.
If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my entire life, I am most surprised by those moments when I have felt as if the sentences, dreams, and pages that have made me so ecstatically happy have not come from my own imagination – that another power has found them and generously presented them to me.
The fueling of anti-Turkish sentiment in Europe is resulting in an anti-European, indiscriminate nationalism in Turkey.
At the age of 60, I am less experimental and more mature. I want most of all to convey my understanding of life.
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.
The hero of the book does long to experience God. But his conception of God is very western.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.’
Being a fiction writer makes you someone who works with irresponsibility.
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.
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.
When I paint, I definitely live in the present, like someone in a shower whistling or singing.
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.
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.
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.
The opponents of this process have always tried to vilify westernization as a poor imitation.
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.
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.
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.
I write a world where everyone is partly right.
My hero wants to belong too, but he doesn’t want to give up all the things he came to value in the west.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t judge my characters.
I see Turkey’s future as being in Europe, as one of many prosperous, tolerant, democratic countries.
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.
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.
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.
I want to describe the psychological state of the people in a certain city.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Language is me, in a way. Really, I feel it.
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.
Generally, I get bad reviews in Turkey.
‘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.
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.
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.
The writer’s secret is not inspiration – for it is never clear where it comes from – it is his stubbornness, his patience.
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.
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.
