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.
O
Orhan Pamuk
Profession:
Novelist
Born:
June 7, 1952
Nationality:
Turkish
Quotes by Orhan Pamuk
Showing 26 of 76 quotes
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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Orhan Pamuk
We fall in love more deeply when we're unhappy.
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Orhan Pamuk
Nothing can be as astounding as life. Except for writing. Yes, of course, except for writing, the sole consolation.
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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.
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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.
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Orhan Pamuk
Life is short, and we should respect every moment of it.
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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.
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Orhan Pamuk
Generally, I get bad reviews in Turkey.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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.'
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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.
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Orhan Pamuk
At first my publisher had reservations about publishing it in the form you are familiar with.
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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.
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Orhan Pamuk
The opponents of this process have always tried to vilify westernization as a poor imitation.
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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.
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Orhan Pamuk
There's been quite a clear upswing in nationalist sentiments. Everyone is talking about it, in Turkey as well.
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Orhan Pamuk
I see Turkey's future as being in Europe, as one of many prosperous, tolerant, democratic countries.
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Orhan Pamuk
The hero of the book does long to experience God. But his conception of God is very western.
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Orhan Pamuk
I really don't want to portray the Islamists as simply evil, the way it's often done in the west.
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Orhan Pamuk
The writer's secret is not inspiration - for it is never clear where it comes from - it is his stubbornness, his patience.
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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.
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Orhan Pamuk