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" I don't like to make strong statements. I want to write strong novels... I keep my deep, radical things for my novels. "
Orhan Pamuk
Write
Want
Things
Related Quotes:
" 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. "
Orhan Pamuk
Speak
Bad
Feel
" I strongly believe that the art of the novel works best when the writer identifies with whoever he or she is writing about. Novels in the end are based on the human capacity, compassion, and I can show more compassion to my characters if I write in a first person singular. "
Orhan Pamuk
Writing
Art
Best
" 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. "
Orhan Pamuk
House
Good
Walk
" 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
" I write a world where everyone is partly right. "
Orhan Pamuk
Where
Everyone
Right
" 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 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. "
Orhan Pamuk
Love
Life
Work
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Orhan Pamuk
Power
Dreams
Life
" 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
" 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. "
Orhan Pamuk
Political
People
Poverty
" At first my publisher had reservations about publishing it in the form you are familiar with. "
Orhan Pamuk
Publishing
You
First
" 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
" 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. "
Orhan Pamuk
Culture
Imagination
Construction
" The challenge is to lend conviction even to the voices which advocate views I find personally abhorrent, whether they are political Islamists or officers justifying a coup. "
Orhan Pamuk
Challenge
Political
Find
" 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. "
Orhan Pamuk
Your
Change
Invention
" 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
" 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. "
Orhan Pamuk
Me
World
Age
" 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. "
Orhan Pamuk
Power
Respect
Take
" 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. "
Orhan Pamuk
Democracy
Respect
People
" 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
" 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
" '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
" 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 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. "
Orhan Pamuk
Myself
Hidden
Love
" 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. "
Orhan Pamuk
Think
Say
Me
" '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. "
Orhan Pamuk
Woman
Politics
Love
" Life is short, and we should respect every moment of it. "
Orhan Pamuk
Moment
Life Is Short
Respect
" 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