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" At the age of 60, I am less experimental and more mature. I want most of all to convey my understanding of life. "
Orhan Pamuk
Age
Want
Understanding
Related Quotes:
" 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. "
Orhan Pamuk
Failure
Positive
History
" 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. "
Orhan Pamuk
Healthy
Child
Feel
" 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. "
Orhan Pamuk
Writing
Life
I Am
" 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.' "
Orhan Pamuk
Creative
Saying
Romantic
" 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. "
Orhan Pamuk
Age
End
Walls
" I have been attacked in Turkey more for my interviews than for my books. Political polemicists and columnists do not read novels there. "
Orhan Pamuk
Books
Political
More
" I want to describe the psychological state of the people in a certain city. "
Orhan Pamuk
Certain
Want
People
" 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. "
Orhan Pamuk
Great
Time
Book
" At first my publisher had reservations about publishing it in the form you are familiar with. "
Orhan Pamuk
Publishing
You
First
" 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. "
Orhan Pamuk
Imagination
Never
Democracy
" Being a fiction writer makes you someone who works with irresponsibility. "
Orhan Pamuk
Someone
Fiction
You
" 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. "
Orhan Pamuk
Courage
Hard Work
People
" I really don't want to portray the Islamists as simply evil, the way it's often done in the west. "
Orhan Pamuk
West
Done
Really
" Life is short, and we should respect every moment of it. "
Orhan Pamuk
Moment
Life Is Short
Respect
" '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. "
Orhan Pamuk
Red
Snow
Book
" 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. "
Orhan Pamuk
World
End
Happy
" Istanbul is a vast place. There are very conservative neighbourhoods, there are places that are upper class, Westernised, consuming Western culture. "
Orhan Pamuk
Class
Culture
Place
" My home is attached to a study - in fact, my home is my study, and I have a little room to sleep in. I need to write looking onto the street or a landscape. Looking at reality from some distance gives me romantic visions. "
Orhan Pamuk
Sleep
Looking
Home
" Language is me, in a way. Really, I feel it. "
Orhan Pamuk
Really
Me
Way
" 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. "
Orhan Pamuk
Kind
Culture
Search
" Novels are political because in them, we try to identify with people who are not like us. And, in that sense, I like the first-person singular because I have to imitate accurately the voice of someone who is not like me. The third-person singular gives me an authority over a character. "
Orhan Pamuk
Political
People
Voice
" I don't judge my characters. "
Orhan Pamuk
Characters
Judge
" 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. "
Orhan Pamuk
Me
Look
Nature
" The writer's secret is not inspiration - for it is never clear where it comes from - it is his stubbornness, his patience. "
Orhan Pamuk
Never
Patience
Secret
" I don't look at emails, Internet or newspapers before 1 P.M. I wake at 7 A.M., eat fruit, drink tea or coffee, and read what I've achieved, or not achieved, the previous day. Then I take a shower and work on my next sentence until 1 P.M. After I've done emails and so on, I write again from 3 P.M. until 8 P.M.; then I socialise. "
Orhan Pamuk
Fruit
Internet
Coffee
" If a writer is to tell his own story - tell it slowly, and as if it were a story about other people - if he is to feel the power of the story rise up inside him, if he is to sit down at a table and patiently give himself over to this art - this craft - he must first have been given some hope. "
Orhan Pamuk
Art
Hope
People
" 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. "
Orhan Pamuk
Away
New
Generation
" My hero wants to belong too, but he doesn't want to give up all the things he came to value in the west. "
Orhan Pamuk
Belong
Want
Hero
" I see Turkey's future as being in Europe, as one of many prosperous, tolerant, democratic countries. "
Orhan Pamuk
Many
I See
Turkey
" Museums are western inventions where the rich and the powerful or the government and the state tend to exhibit the signs and symbol and images of their culture. "
Orhan Pamuk
Culture
Powerful
Rich