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" 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. "

Orhan Pamuk

Text

Five

Will

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" I don't judge my characters. "

Orhan Pamuk

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" 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. "

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

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

Orhan Pamuk

Really

Way

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" '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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" There's been quite a clear upswing in nationalist sentiments. Everyone is talking about it, in Turkey as well. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" The fueling of anti-Turkish sentiment in Europe is resulting in an anti-European, indiscriminate nationalism in Turkey. "

" 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. "

" I would be pleased if someone would invent a pill to remove my impatience, moodiness, and occasional bursts of anger. But if they did, I wouldn't be able to write my novels or paint. "

" 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

Look

Nature

" 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 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. "

" Idealism, unrealistic idealism, is always contrasted with the reality of the people, of the man in the street. The details of daily life are always more convincing than the political fantasies of the earlier generations. "