Elif Safak

“God is the biggest storyteller, and when we create stories, we connect with him and with each other across cultural, religious and gender boundaries.”

“I was in Madrid as a young girl and a teenager. I'll never forget when I went to the Prado Museum for the first time and saw the paintings of Goya. They had such a big impact on me.”

“When I was 10 years old, we moved to Spain with my mother. I learned Spanish before I learned English. But the English language stayed with me.”

“Books change us. Books save us. I know this because it happened to me. Books saved me. So, I do believe through stories we can learn to change, we can learn to empathize and be more connected with the universe and with humanity.”

“For me, writing stories is one way of feeling connected to the universe and God.”

“If there is no love between the author and the story, there is no love between the reader and the story.”

“My readers are surprisingly mixed. I have conservative readers - for instance, women with headscarves - but also many liberal, leftist, feminist, nihilist, environmentalist, and secularist readers. Next to those are mystics, agnostics, Kurds, Turks, Alevis, Sunnis, gays, housewives, and businesswomen.”

“I write as if I were drunk. It is a process of intuition rather than placing myself above my story like a puppeteer pulling strings. For me, it's a scary, chaotic process over which I have little control. Words demand other words, characters resist me.”

“I write with humour about sadness, to introduce an element of sweet to the sour, a bit like Turkish food.”

“I find families intriguing, perhaps because I did not grow up in one. I was raised by a feminist, independent, single mother, a divorcee.”

“There are two different ways of writing a novel. The first I call the traditional father way, when the novelist slightly situates himself or herself above the text and knows what each and every character is going to do. It's a bit like engineering. I've never felt close to that tradition. I like the second way, which relies a bit more on intuition.”

“Politicians and leaders who see the media as 'the enemy within' divide society into two clashing cultural camps. Populist demagogues benefit from binary oppositions.”

“I write my novels in English first; then they are translated into Turkish by professional translators. Then I take their translation and rewrite. So basically, I write the same novel twice.”