Pamuk Quotes & Sayings

I certainly see myself more as a craftsman than as an artist. — Orhan Pamuk

Idealism, unrealistic idealism, is always contrasted with the reality of the people, of the man in the street. The details of daily life are always more convincing than the political fantasies of the earlier generations. — Orhan Pamuk

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. — Orhan Pamuk

When I was publishing my first books, the previous generation of authors was fading away, so I was welcomed because I was a new author. — Orhan Pamuk

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. — Orhan Pamuk

In the cities of the European Franks, women roam about exposing not only their faces, but also their brightly shining hair (after their necks, their most attractive feature), their arms, their beautiful throats, and even, if what Ive heard is true, a portion of their gorgeous legs; as a result, the men of those cities walk about with great difficulty, embarrassed and in extreme pain, because, you see, their front sides are always erect and this fact naturally leads to the paralysis of their society. Undoubtedly, this is why each day the Frank infidel surrenders another fortress to us Ottomans. — Orhan Pamuk

[N]othing is as surprising as life. Except for writing. Except for writing. Yes, of course, except for writing, the only consolation. — Orhan Pamuk

I have hired a bodyguard, on the recommendation of my friends and the government. It's outrageous, having to live like this. — Orhan Pamuk

When you see a beautiful woman in the street, don't look at her hatefully as if you're about to kill her and don't exhibit excessive longing either; just give her a little smile, avert your eyes, and walk on [1974]. Taking — Orhan Pamuk

Read them, read and learn, because there's so much to do, you know. — Orhan Pamuk

I strongly believe that the art of the novel works best when the writer identifies with whoever he or she is writing about. Novels in the end are based on the human capacity, compassion, and I can show more compassion to my characters if I write in a first person singular. — Orhan Pamuk

Man's sentimental attachment to objects is one of life's greatest consolations. — Orhan Pamuk

People only tell lies when there is something they are terribly frightened of losing. — Orhan Pamuk

Censorship should never be allowed. One should be able to say anything. But I refuse to let politics be foisted on me. — Orhan Pamuk

But no one believes in that way what he reads in a novel ... Oh yes they do. If only to see themselves as wise and superior and humanistic, they need to think of us as sweet and funny, and convince themselves that they sympathize with the way we are and even love us. — Orhan Pamuk

Most of the time it's not the Europeans who belittle us. What happens when we look at them is that we belittle ourselves. When we undertake the pilgrimage, it's not just to escape the tyranny at home but also to reach to the depths of our souls. The day arrives when the guilty must return to save those who could not find the courage to leave. — Orhan Pamuk

Down your order. — Orhan Pamuk

For a novel need not be full of sorrow just because its heroes are suffering. — Orhan Pamuk

With the engine stalled, we would notice the deep silence reigning in the park around us, in the summer villa before us, in the world everywhere. We would listen enchanted to the whirring of an insect beginning vernal flight before the onset of spring, and we would know what a wondrous thing it was to be alive in a park on a spring day in Istanbul. — Orhan Pamuk

When Turkey began approaching the EU, I wasn't the only one who worried that the dark stain in Turkey's history - or rather the history of the Ottoman Empire - could become a problem one day. In other words, what happened to the Armenians in World War I. That's why I couldn't leave the issue untouched. — Orhan Pamuk

To know is to remember that you've seen.To see is to know without remembering. Thus painting is remembering the blackness. — Orhan Pamuk

National consciousness is truly a miraculous thing. When I am not in Turkey I feel even more Turkish than in Istanbul. But when I'm home my European side becomes more apparent. — Orhan Pamuk

I wrote 'My Name is Red' just to remember painting, where the hand does it before the intellect. When I'm captive to it, I'm a happier person. Kierkegaard tells us that a happy person is someone who lives in the present; the unhappy person, someone who lives either in the past or the future. — Orhan Pamuk

Only vulgar people boast about how happy they are — 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

Whatever anybody says, the most important thing in life is to be happy. — Orhan Pamuk

Mankind's greatest error, the biggest deception of the past thousand years is this: to confuse poverty with stupidity. — Orhan Pamuk

Nothing changed in my life since I work all the time," Pamuk said then. "I've spent 30 years writing fiction. For the first 10 years I worried about money and no one asked me how much money I made. The second decade I spent money and no one was asking me about that. And I've spent the last 10 years with everyone expecting to hear how I spend the money, which I will not do. — Orhan Pamuk

Love is the ability to make the invisible visible and the desire always to feel the invisible in one's midst. — Orhan Pamuk

I consider myself a person who comes from a Muslim culture. In any case, I would not say that I'm an atheist. So I'm a Muslim who associates historical and cultural identification with this religion. — Orhan Pamuk

You'll forget it all: the cruel power of your superiors, the thoughtless things you wish you'd never said, the stupidities, the unfinished work, the lack of consideration, the betrayals, the injustices, the indifference, those who've blamed you, those who will blame you, your financial troubles, the rush of time, the endless waits, the things and people forever beyond your reach, your loneliness, your shame, your defeats, your wretchedness, your pain, and the catastrophes - all those catastrophes - in just a few minutes you'll forget them all. The prospect comforts you. Patiently you wait. — Orhan Pamuk

What Pamuk is also engaging with at this point and throughout the book is the relationship of memory and photography and the argument put forward by Walter Benjamin and other commentators that photography creates a 'false' or 'counter' memory which results in what Sontag calls the replacement of memory by a photograph.24 — Patrizia Di Bello

What was the difference between love and the agony of waiting? Like love, the agony of waiting began in the muscles and 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

The sight of snow made her think how beautiful and short life is and how, in spite of all their enmities, people have so very much in common; measured against eternity and the greatness of creation, the world in which they lived was narrow. That's why snow drew people together. It was as if snow cast a veil over hatreds, greed, and wrath and made everyone feel close to one another.
Snow pg 119 — Orhan Pamuk

I read a book one day and my whole life was changed. — Orhan Pamuk

The task of writing a novel is to imagine a world
a world that first exists as a picture before it eventually takes the form of words. Only later do we express through words the picture we imagine, so that readers can share this product of the imagination. — Orhan Pamuk

Expressing one's reality in words, as truthful as they might be, goads one to insincerity. — Orhan Pamuk

We don't need more museums that try to construct the historical narratives of a society, community, team, nation, state, tribe, company, or species. We all know that the ordinary, everyday stories of individuals are riches, more humane, and much more joyful. — Orhan Pamuk

If they spoke, it was in whispers — Orhan Pamuk

Love is a sacred silence. — Orhan Pamuk

Painting taught literature to describe. — Orhan Pamuk

Football can teach us that although a team's individual players may be weak, it can still be successful if it uses common sense. Or that we should not attack anyone physically when we suffer a depressing defeat. — Orhan Pamuk

You cannot embark on life, that one-off coach ride, once again when it is over,
but if you have a book in your hand, no matter how complex or difficult, when you have finished it, you can, if you wish, go back to the beginning, read it again, and thus understand that which is difficult and, with it, understand life as well. — Orhan Pamuk

I need a moment of time for myself every day, like a child playing with his things. When I travel, I routinely find a quiet place, open my diary and write something in it. — Orhan Pamuk

To appropriate an invention, be it artistic or technical, you have to have at least a part of your spirit embracing it so radically that you somehow change. — Orhan Pamuk

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 Pamuk

I think novelists should be disciplined and self-imposed working hours. I work a lot, but I don't feel that I'm working. I always feel that there is a child in me, healthy, and I'm playing. — Orhan Pamuk

In fact no one recognizes the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it. It may well be that, in a moment of joy, one might sincerely believe that they are living that golden instant "now," even having lived such a moment before, but whatever they say, in one part of their hearts they still believe in the certainty of a happier moment to come. Because how could anyone, and particularly anyone who is still young, carry on with the belief that everything could only get worse: If a person is happy enough to think he has reached the happiest moment of his life, he will be hopeful enough to believe his future will be just as beautiful, more so. — Orhan Pamuk

Time had not faded my memories (as I had prayed to God it might), nor had it healed my wounds as it is said always to do. I began each day with the hope that the next day would be better, my recollections a little less pointed, but I would awake to the same pain, as if a black lamp were burning eternally inside me, radiating darkness. — Orhan Pamuk

I once left Istanbul in the purse of a preacher from Edirne who was going to Manisa. On the way, we happened to be attacked by thieves. One of them shouted, "Your money or your life!" Panicking, the miserable preacher hid us in his asshole. This spot, which he assumed was the safest, smelled worse than the mouth of the garlic lover and was much less comfortable. But the situation quickly grew worse when instead of "Your money or your life!" the thieves began to shout "Your honor or your life!" Lining up, they took him by turns. I don't dare describe the agony we suffered in that cramped hole. It's for this reason that I dislike leaving Istanbul.

(~I am a gold coin) — Orhan Pamuk

Every person had a star, every star had a friend, and for every person carrying a star there was someone else who reflected it, and everyone carried this reflection as a secret confidant in his heart. — Orhan Pamuk

I don't want to be a tree; I want to be its meaning. — Orhan Pamuk

My dark beloved, my troubled hero, were you unable to sleep for thinking of me the whole night? Is that why the blush has left your face? — Orhan Pamuk

I sometimes joke that I am the first writer of historical fiction who can look out his window and point to the objects in his novels. I have a view of the entrance to the Bosporus, the old city, Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque. — Orhan Pamuk

After I made it my business to find out how much money people have been squandering on these frivolous and insanely ostentatious fireworks displays we've seen in every corner of Istanbul every night this summer, I had to ask myself if the people celebrating at those weddings might not have been happier - bearing in mind that we are now a city of ten million people - if the money had been spent on educating the children of the poor. Am I right or wrong [1997]? Especially — Orhan Pamuk

In his brilliant new book Pankaj Mishra reverses the long gaze of the West upon the East, showing modern history as it has been felt by the majority of the world's population from Turkey to China. These are the amazing stories of the grandfathers of today's angry Asians. Excellent! — Orhan Pamuk

What we essentially want is to draw something unknown to us in all its shadowiness, not something we know in all its illumination. — Orhan Pamuk

There's been quite a clear upswing in nationalist sentiments. Everyone is talking about it, in Turkey as well. — Orhan Pamuk

Just as good books give me the joys of being alive, bad novels depress me, and as I notice this sentiment coming from the pages, I stop. I also do not hesitate to walk out of a movie house if the film is bad. — 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

True literature is more than just a story someone has told. It must provide the reader with the essence of the world on a moral, philosophical and emotional level. — 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

Their imaginations were fed by exile, a nourishment drawn not through roots but through rootlessness. My imagination, however, requires that I stay in the same city, on the same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul's fate is my fate. I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am. Gustave — Orhan Pamuk

I do not believe in a personal connection to God; that's where it gets transcendental. — Orhan Pamuk

I envy cornerstone in empty deserts, because they are themselves, and for the same reason I envy rocks in the hills, where man has never set foot, and trees in the valleys that man has ever seen. — Orhan Pamuk

These were innocent people, so innocent that they thought poverty a crime that wealth would allow them to forget.
from the notebooks of Celal Salik — Orhan Pamuk

If I see my city as beautiful and bewitching, then my life must be so too. — Orhan Pamuk

I was trying to think of something to say that would sound more meaningful, but when you get sown to it, words aren't very useful at baring our souls, they're just something else to hide behind. — Orhan Pamuk

Heaven was the place where you kept alive the dreams of your memories. — Orhan Pamuk

My childhood proved to me that there could be no enjoyment of football without community. But it becomes difficult when this community is having problems with its identity. That's when we experience all possible forms of nationalist exaggeration. — Orhan Pamuk

As in many other cities, money no longer had any value in Istanbul. At the time I returned from the East, bakeries that once sold large one-hundred drachma loaves of bread for one silver coin now baked loaves half the size for the same price, and they no longer tasted the way they did during my childhood. — Orhan Pamuk

so the knowledge of their presence remained, for the time being, strictly within the bounds of people's private thoughts, lying dormant in a corner of their minds like a secret language spoken only at home. — Orhan Pamuk

In a city where men are killing each other like animals just to make it a happier place, who has the right to stop me from killing myself? — Orhan Pamuk

We passed through forests of
fire, forded rivers of light and forged dark seas and mountains of snow and ice.
Each crossing took us thousands of years, though it seemed no more than the
blink of an eye. — Orhan Pamuk

The difference lies in the fact that in Istanbul the remains of a glorious past civilization are everywhere visible. No matter how ill-kept, no matter how neglected or hemmed in they are by concrete monstrosities, the great mosques and other monuments of the city, as well as the lesser detritus of empire in every side street and corner - the little arches, fountains, and neighborhood mosques - inflict heartache on all who live among them. These — Orhan Pamuk

I read somewhere that luck is not blind, just illiterate. Luck, I mused, is a palliative for those who don't know probability and statistics. — Orhan Pamuk

When you love a city and have explored it frequently on foot, your body, not to mention your soul, gets to know the streets so well after a number of years that in a fit of melancholy, perhaps stirred by a light snow falling ever so sorrowfully, you'll discover your legs carrying you of their own accord toward one of your favourite promontories — 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

I am a highly disciplined person. I get up at seven every morning and, still in my pajamas, sit down at my desk where my checkered ring binders and my fountain pen are ready for use. I try to write two pages every day. — Orhan Pamuk

I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well. — Orhan Pamuk

I really don't want to portray the Islamists as simply evil, the way it's often done in the west. — Orhan Pamuk

The real question is how much suffering we've caused our womenfolk by turning headscarves into symbols - and using women as pawns in a political game. — Orhan Pamuk

Maybe you've understood by now that for men like myself, that is, melancholy men for whom love, agony, happiness and misery are just excuses for maintaining eternal loneliness, life offers neither great joy nor great sadness. — Orhan Pamuk

I identify with my culture, but I am happy to be living on a tolerant, intellectual island where I can deal with Dostoyevsky and Sartre, both great influences for me. — Orhan Pamuk

In order to find meaning and readerly pleasure in the universe the writer reveals to us, we feel we must search for the novel's secret center, and we therefore try to embed every detail of the novel in our memory, as if learning each leaf of a tree by heart. — Orhan Pamuk

Self-hatred is OK. I have self-hatred, too. It's OK. What's bad is if you don't know how to get out of it, don't know how to manage it. Self-hatred is, in fact, a good thing if you can clearly see the mechanism of it, because it helps you to understand others. — Orhan Pamuk

I had the feeling that focusing on objects and telling a story through them would make my protagonists different from those in Western novels - more real, more quintessentially of Istanbul. — Orhan Pamuk

There are three types of buildings in Istanbul, he used to say: (1) those full of devout families where people say their daily prayers and leave their shoes outside, (2) rich and Westernized homes where you can go in with your shoes on, (3) new high-rise blocks where you can find a mix of both sorts. — Orhan Pamuk

Not a day passes when the eagle of dark depression doesn't take flight in my soul, said Sunay, infusing his words with mysterious pride. But I cannot catch myself. So hold yourself in. All's well that ends well. — Orhan Pamuk

If the Americans would only take all the money they have spent on this war (Iraq), and spend it like Soros has done on civil societies in these countries, then in 10 years they would have wonderful results. — Orhan Pamuk

Over time, the persona I assumed in her presence came to supplant my true self. It must have been then I first came to realize that for most people life was not a joy to be embraced with a full heart but a miserable charade to be endured with a false smile, a narrow path of lies, punishment, and repression. — Orhan Pamuk

Happiness is holding someone in your arms and knowing you hold the whole world. — 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

If the soulmate is absent there is no need for the soul — Orhan Pamuk

Modernity means overabundance. We are living in the age of mass-produced objects, things that come without announcing themselves and end up on our tables, on our walls. We use them - most of us don't even notice them - and then they vanish without fanfare. — Orhan Pamuk

I am proud to be a Turk, and to write in Turkish about Turkey - and to have been translated into about 40 languages. But I don't want to politicize things by dramatizing them. — Orhan Pamuk

Listen to me: Life is not about principles; it's about happiness.'
'But if you don't have any principles, and if you don't have faith, you can't be happy at all,' said Kadife.
'That's true. But 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 ideas? Only people in rich countries can enjoy such luxuries.'
'Actually, it's the other way round. In a poor country, people's sole consolation comes from their beliefs. — Orhan Pamuk

To write is to transform that inward gaze into words, to study the worlds into which we pass when we retire into ourselves, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy. — Orhan Pamuk

Writing my own diary is the best form of remembrance, but only for my own use. I need these notes; it's like an impulse. — Orhan Pamuk

A nation could change its way of life, its history, its technology, its art, literature, and culture, but it would never have a real chance to change its gestures. — Orhan Pamuk