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" 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. "

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" '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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" I wrote 'My Name is Red' just to remember painting, where the hand does it before the intellect. When I'm captive to it, I'm a happier person. Kierkegaard tells us that a happy person is someone who lives in the present; the unhappy person, someone who lives either in the past or the future. "

" Being a fiction writer makes you someone who works with irresponsibility. "

" I always enjoy impersonating my characters in the first-person singular. "

" Oscar Wilde always makes me smile - with respect and admiration. His short stories prove that it is possible to be both sarcastic, even cynical, but deeply compassionate. Just seeing the cover of one of Wilde's books in a bookshop makes me smile. "

" The hero of the book does long to experience God. But his conception of God is very western. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I get used to my fountain pens and my clothes, and I can never throw them away. I replace them only when I see that they are broken or embarrassing to wear. "

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

" 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. "

" I want to describe the psychological state of the people in a certain city. "

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

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

" '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. "

" 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. "

" At first my publisher had reservations about publishing it in the form you are familiar with. "

" 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. "

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

" Generally, I get bad reviews in Turkey. "

" My hero wants to belong too, but he doesn't want to give up all the things he came to value 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 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. "

" 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

World

Age

" 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.' "