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" Istanbul is a vast place. There are very conservative neighbourhoods, there are places that are upper class, Westernised, consuming Western culture. "

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" 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 have been attacked in Turkey more for my interviews than for my books. Political polemicists and columnists do not read novels there. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The opponents of this process have always tried to vilify westernization as a poor imitation. "

" I see Turkey's future as being in Europe, as one of many prosperous, tolerant, democratic countries. "

" I really don't want to portray the Islamists as simply evil, the way it's often done in the west. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" '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. "

" 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. "

" Language is me, in a way. Really, I feel 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. "

" First, I would find an object which I would think is suitable for my characters and stories, then write about it, and in the end, I ended up with a house full of thousands of objects. "

" 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. "

" A museum should not just be a place for fancy paintings but should be a place where we can communicate our lives through our everyday objects. "

" I write a world where everyone is partly right. "

" 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. "

" We fall in love more deeply when we're unhappy. "

" 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. "

" Life is short, and we should respect every moment of it. "

" I think less than people think I do about politics. I care about writing. "

" 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. "

" Self-hatred is OK. I have self-hatred, too. It's OK. What's bad is if you don't know how to get out of it, don't know how to manage it. Self-hatred is, in fact, a good thing if you can clearly see the mechanism of it, because it helps you to understand others. "

" When I paint, I definitely live in the present, like someone in a shower whistling or singing. "

" 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. "

" Nothing can be as astounding as life. Except for writing. Yes, of course, except for writing, the sole consolation. "

" 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. "