01c. 1952 ADHeroic 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 / quote ↗
03c. 1952 ADI asked him about his enemies. He began to count them. The list went on and on...." - Conversations with Yahya KemalOrhan Pamuk / quote ↗
04c. 1952 ADIt’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 / quote ↗
05c. 1952 ADEventually, 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 / quote ↗
06c. 1952 ADThe gap between compassion and surrender is love’s darkest, deepest region.Orhan Pamuk / quote ↗
07c. 1952 ADWhen two people love each other as we do, no one can come between them, no one," I said, amazed at the words I was uttering without preparation. "Lovers like us, because they know that nothing can destroy their love, even on the worst days, even when they are heedlessly hurting each other in the cruelest , most deceitful ways, still carry in their hearts a consolation that never abandons them." (p.191)Orhan Pamuk / quote ↗
08c. 1952 ADIf 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 / quote ↗
10c. 1952 ADI 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 / quote ↗
11c. 1952 ADOscar 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 / quote ↗
12c. 1952 ADIf 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 / quote ↗
13c. 1952 ADGood 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 / quote ↗
14c. 1952 ADI 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.Orhan Pamuk / quote ↗
15c. 1952 ADThe writer's secret is not inspiration - for it is never clear where it comes from - it is his stubbornness, his patience.Orhan Pamuk / quote ↗
16c. 1952 ADWhen 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 / quote ↗
17c. 1952 ADThe 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 / quote ↗
18c. 1952 ADI 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 / quote ↗
19c. 1952 ADThe 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 / quote ↗
20c. 1952 ADI 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 / quote ↗
21c. 1952 ADAuthoritarianism, 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 / quote ↗
22c. 1952 AD'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 / quote ↗
23c. 1952 ADI 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 / quote ↗
24c. 1952 ADMy 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 / quote ↗
