Try to discover who I am from my choice of words and colors, as attentive people like yourselves might examine footprints to catch a thief.
Orhan PamukRead
I have been attacked in Turkey more for my interviews than for my books. Political polemicists and columnists do not read novels there.
Interpretation
Orhan Pamuk suggests that his outspoken views are more controversial than his literary works.
In this quote, Orhan Pamuk reflects on his experiences in Turkey, emphasizing that his political interviews garner more scrutiny than his novels. This indicates a cultural landscape where political discourse outweighs the appreciation for literary art, revealing a disconnect between the two realms in his home country.
In practice
During a literary festival, one could use this quote to highlight the interplay between politics and literature.
Try to discover who I am from my choice of words and colors, as attentive people like yourselves might examine footprints to catch a thief.
The beauty and mystery of this world only emerges through affection, attention, interest and compassion . . . open your eyes wide and actually see this world by attending to its colors, details and irony.
Where there is true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity.
It was in Cihangir that i first learned Istanbul was not an anonymous multitude of walled-in lives - a jungle of apartments where no one knew who was dead or who was celebrating what - but an archipelago of neighbourhoods in which everyone knew each other.
We had no desire to live in Istanbul, nor in Paris or New York. Let them have their discos and dollars, their skycrapers and supersonics transports. Let them have their radios and their color TV, hey, we have ours, don't we? But we have something they don't have. Heart. We have heart. Look, look how the light of life seeps into my very heart
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've been writing long enough to know that fiction, as a rhetorical mode, works very differently from expository writing. If an author has a specific critique about contemporary society in mind, fiction tends not to be the best means to deliver that critique.
Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.
In literature, you know only what you imagine
When I went to college - when I read Shakespeare or Dickens or Scott - I just felt that, as a citizen of England, a British citizen, this was as much my heritage as any schoolboy's. That is one of the things the Empire taught, that apart from citizenship, the synonymous inheritance of the citizenship was the literature.
Fiction is the only way I know a human being can inhabit the mind of another human being.
English writing tends to fall into two categories - the big, baggy epic novel or the fairly controlled, tidy novel. For a long time, I was a fan of the big, baggy novel, but there's definitely an advantage to having a little bit more control.
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