Orhan Pamuk Quotes

There are two kinds of Communists: the arrogant ones, who enter the fray hoping to make men out of the people and bring progress to the nation; and the innocent ones, who get involved because they believe in equality and justice. The arrogant ones are obsessed with power; they presume to think for everyone; only bad can come of them. But the innocents? The only harm they do is to themselves. But that's all they ever wanted in the first place. They feel so guilty about the suffering of the poor, and are so keen to share it, that they make their lives miserable on purpose.

~ Orhan Pamuk

I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darknness.

~ Orhan Pamuk

Because, as I would always tell myself so many years later, lying here in my bed: You can't start out again in life, that's a carriage ride you only take once, but with a book in your hand, no matter how confusing and perplexing it might be, once you've finished it, you can always go back to the beginning; if you like, you can read it through again, in order to figure out what you couldn't understand before, in order to understand life, isn't that so, Fatma?

~ Orhan Pamuk

Dogs do speak, but only to those who know how to listen.

~ Orhan Pamuk

...in a brutal country like ours where human life is cheap, it's stupid to destroy yourself for the sake of your beliefs. Beliefs, high ideals--only people living in rich countries can enjoy such luxuries.' '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.

~ Orhan Pamuk

It's such a shame that we know so little about our own country, that we can't find it in our hearts to love our own kind. Instead we admire those who show our country disrespect and betray its people.

~ Orhan Pamuk

...when a good poet is confronted with difficult facts that he knows to be true but also are inimical to poetry, he has no choice but to flee to the margins; it was...this very retreat that allowed him to hear the hidden music that is the source of all art.

~ Orhan Pamuk

The sea was as dark as dreams and as deep as sleep.

~ Orhan Pamuk

Yet does illustrating in a new way signify a new way of seeing?

~ Orhan Pamuk

The knowledge that she could learn to love a man had always meant more to her than loving him effortlessly, more even than falling in love, and that was why now she felt herself to be on the threshold of a new life, a happiness bound to endure for a very long time.

~ Orhan Pamuk

The knowledge that she could learn to love a man had always meant more to her than loving him effortlessly, more even than falling in love, and that was why she now felt that she was on the threshold of a new life, a happiness bound to endure for a very long time.

~ Orhan Pamuk

What was the difference between love and the agony of waiting? Like love, the agony of waiting began in the muscles somewhere around the upper belly but soon spread out to the chest, the thighs, and the forehead, to invade the entire body with numbing force.

~ Orhan Pamuk

This is the greatest consolation in life. In poetically well-built museums, formed from the heart's compulsions, we are consoled not by finding in them old objects that we love, but by losing all sense of Time.

~ Orhan Pamuk

Heroic dreams are the consolation of the unhappy. After all, when people like us say we're being heroic, it usually means we're about to kill each other--or kill ourselves.

~ Orhan Pamuk

It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn't know it.

~ Orhan Pamuk

I asked him about his enemies. He began to count them. The list went on and on.... - Conversations with Yahya Kemal

~ Orhan Pamuk

It’s not enough to be oppressed, you must also be in the right. Most oppressed people are in the wrong to an almost ridiculous degree. What shall I believe in?

~ Orhan Pamuk

Eventually, we come to love certain novels because we have expended so much imaginative labor on them. This is why we hang on to those novels, whose pages are creased and dog-eared.

~ Orhan Pamuk

The gap between compassion and surrender is love’s darkest, deepest region.

~ Orhan Pamuk

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.

~ Orhan Pamuk

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

~ Orhan Pamuk

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.

~ Orhan Pamuk

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.

~ Orhan Pamuk

If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my entire life, I am most surprised by those moments when I have felt as if the sentences, dreams, and pages that have made me so ecstatically happy have not come from my own imagination - that another power has found them and generously presented them to me.

~ Orhan Pamuk

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.

~ Orhan Pamuk

The writer's secret is not inspiration - for it is never clear where it comes from - it is his stubbornness, his patience.

~ Orhan Pamuk

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.

~ Orhan Pamuk

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.

~ Orhan Pamuk

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.

~ Orhan Pamuk

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.

~ Orhan Pamuk

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.

~ Orhan Pamuk

Authoritarianism, an unrealistic occidental imagination - these issues will never be settled. Turkey will continue to take Europe as a model; it will continue to pursue its search for democracy.

~ Orhan Pamuk

'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

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.'

~ Orhan Pamuk

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.

~ Orhan Pamuk

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.

~ Orhan Pamuk