Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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. "
Orhan Pamuk
Different
Feeling
Real
Related Quotes:
" 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. "
Orhan Pamuk
Well
Hand
Need
" 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. "
Orhan Pamuk
Partner
Imagination
Thought
" '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
" 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
" There's been quite a clear upswing in nationalist sentiments. Everyone is talking about it, in Turkey as well. "
Orhan Pamuk
Everyone
Clear
Well
" 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
" 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
" Language is me, in a way. Really, I feel it. "
Orhan Pamuk
Really
Me
Way
" 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 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 think less than people think I do about politics. I care about writing. "
Orhan Pamuk
People
Writing
Care
" 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
" 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
" The hero of the book does long to experience God. But his conception of God is very western. "
Orhan Pamuk
Hero
Experience
God
" 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
" 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
" 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
" We fall in love more deeply when we're unhappy. "
Orhan Pamuk
Unhappy
Deeply
Fall
" 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
" I always enjoy impersonating my characters in the first-person singular. "
Orhan Pamuk
Enjoy
First-Person
Characters
" I write a world where everyone is partly right. "
Orhan Pamuk
Where
Everyone
Right
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" When I paint, I definitely live in the present, like someone in a shower whistling or singing. "
Orhan Pamuk
Live
Someone
Singing
" 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. "
Orhan Pamuk
Habit
Civilization
People
" 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
" 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
" I don't judge my characters. "
Orhan Pamuk
Characters
Judge