Orhan Pamuk

I realized that the longing for art, like the longing for love, is a malady that blinds us, and makes us forget the things we already know, obscuring reality.

In the mornings I used to say goodbye to my wife like someone going to work. I'd leave the house, walk around a few blocks, and come back like a person arriving at the office.

Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among themselves, transforming my head into an orchestra pit where different musical instruments sounded out, and I would realize that I could endure this life because of these musicales going on in my head.

Snow reminds Ka of God! But I’m not sure it would be accurate. What brings me close to God is the silence of snow.

People only tell lies when there is something they are terribly frightened of losing.

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.

Mankind's greatest error, the biggest deception of the past thousand years is this: to confuse poverty with stupidity.

Actually, it's the other way round. In a poor country, the only consolation people can have is the one that comes from their beliefs.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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 don't like to make strong statements. I want to write strong novels... I keep my deep, radical things for my novels.

Over time, I have come to see the work of literature less as narrating the world than "seeing the world with words." From the moment he begins to use words like colors in a painting, a writer can begin to see how wondrous and surprising the world is, and he breaks the bones of language to find his own voice. For this he needs paper, a pen, and the optimism of a child looking at the world for the first time.

For the traveler we see leaning on his neighbor is an honest and well-meaning man and full of melancholy, like those Chekhov characters so laden with virtues that they never know success in life.

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.

One side of me is very busy paying attention to the details of life, the humanity of people, catching the street voices, the middle-class, upper-middle-class secret lives of Turks. The other side is interested in history and class and gender, trying to get all of society in a very realistic way.

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