Orhan Pamuk

“Life is beautiful if you are on the road to somewhere”

“I don't judge my characters.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Despite the loss they were suffering, they'd both relaxed - as people do when they realize they've run out of chances for happiness”

“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.”

“Einstein...even failed physics once, but he'd never thought of giving up school to make a living.”

“Remembering the past always comes with an image or a view attached.”

“I always enjoy impersonating my characters in the first-person singular.”

“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.”

“Culture is mix. Culture means a mix of things from other sources. And my town, Istanbul, was this kind of mix. Istanbul, in fact, and my work, is a testimony to the fact that East and West combine cultural gracefully, or sometimes in an anarchic way, came together, and that is what we should search for.”

“I get used to my fountain pens and my clothes, and I can never throw them away. I replace them only when I see that they are broken or embarrassing to wear.”

“The greatest happiness is when the eye discovers beauty where neither then mind conceived of nor the hand intended any.”

“I do know this much though: If a man resorts to wiles, guile and petty deceptions, it means he's nowhere near being in love.”

“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.”

“Sometimes I would see them not as mementos of the blissful hours but as the tangible precious debris of the storm raging in my soul.”

“…he quit drinking coffee, and naturally, his brain stopped working.”

“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 think less than people think I do about politics. I care about writing.”

“We fall in love more deeply when we're unhappy.”