Top 100 Orhan Pamuk Quotes
#1. It is not my intention to explain Turkey, its culture and its problems. My literature has a universal concern: I want to bring people and their emotions closer to my readers, not explain Turkish politics.
Orhan Pamuk
#2. 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
#5. The essential reason for my loneliness is that I don't even know where I belong.
Orhan Pamuk
#6. Life is beautiful if you are on the road to somewhere
Orhan Pamuk
#7. Sometimes I wonder what my interior actually is. A heart that goes pitter-patter and thoughts that glide by like little paper boats on flowing water,
Orhan Pamuk
#8. It's a great relief for me that no one will ask me anymore: "Orhan, when will you get the Nobel Prize?"
Orhan Pamuk
#9. 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
#10. I came across humanity in Istanbul, and all I know about life comes from Istanbul, and definitely, I am writing about Istanbul. I also love the city because I live there, it has formed me, and it's me. Of course it is natural. If somebody lived all his life in Delhi, he will write about Delhi.
Orhan Pamuk
#11. If you wanted to buy anything from Ligor, you'd lower a basket from your floor and then shout
Orhan Pamuk
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. What is it to be a color? Color is the touch of the eye, music to the deaf, a word out of the darkness.
Orhan Pamuk
#16. What is the meaning of it all, of this ... of this world?
'Mystery', I heard in my thoughts, or perhaps, 'mercy', but I wasn't certain of either.
Orhan Pamuk
#17. Dogs do speak, but only to those who listen
Orhan Pamuk
#18. 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
#19. When people read a novel 600 pages long, six months pass, and all they will remember are five pages. They don't remember the text - instead, they remember the sensations the text gives them.
Orhan Pamuk
#20. A novelist is essentially a person who covers distance through his patience, slowly, like an ant. A novelist impresses us not by his demonic and romantic vision, but by his patience.
Orhan Pamuk
#21. For if a lover's face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home.
Orhan Pamuk
#22. I want to describe the psychological state of the people in a certain city.
Orhan Pamuk
#23. It was in Cihangir that i first learned Istanbul was not an anonymous multitude of walled-in lives - a jungle of apartments where no one knew who was dead or who was celebrating what - but an archipelago of neighbourhoods in which everyone knew each other.
Orhan Pamuk
#25. 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
#26. In the beginning the point was not to have a point, to escape the world in which everyone had to have a job, a desk, an office.
Orhan Pamuk
#27. 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
#28. Nothing makes you happy in life except love... Neither the books you write or cites you see... I am very lonely... If I say that I want to be here in this city close to you until the end of my life would you believe me?
Orhan Pamuk
#29. This, then, is how we first came across the fearsome secret history of turkey's mannequins.
Orhan Pamuk
#30. 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.
Orhan Pamuk
#31. The greatest happiness is when the eye discovers beauty where neither then mind conceived of nor the hand intended any.
Orhan Pamuk
#32. In the mornings I used to say goodbye to my wife like someone going to work. I'd leave the house, walk around a few blocks, and come back like a person arriving at the office.
Orhan Pamuk
#33. Istanbul is a vast place. There are very conservative neighbourhoods, there are places that are upper class, Westernised, consuming Western culture.
Orhan Pamuk
#34. 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
#35. When we lose people we love, we should never disturb their souls, whether living or dead. Instead. we should find consolation in an object that reminds you of them, something ... I don't know ... even an earring
Orhan Pamuk
#36. My religion is complicated. Literature is my true religion. After all, I come from a completely non-religious family.
Orhan Pamuk
#37. At the heart of the novelist's craft lies an optimism which thinks that the knowledge we gather from our everyday experience, if given proper form, can become valuable knowledge about reality.
Orhan Pamuk
#38. Teacher. After becoming engaged to my grandfather, and before marrying him, she did something rather brave in Istanbul in 1917 - she went out with him to a restaurant.
Orhan Pamuk
#39. Language is me, in a way. Really, I feel it.
Orhan Pamuk
#40. The fueling of anti-Turkish sentiment in Europe is resulting in an anti-European, indiscriminate nationalism in Turkey.
Orhan Pamuk
#41. There was something pretentious about politics when it was taken to extremes.
Orhan Pamuk
#42. WHAT MAKES CITY LIFE MEANINGFUL IS THE THINGS WE HIDE.
Orhan Pamuk
#43. 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
#44. Believing that Sibel was saying these things to me to make me angry, I got angry. But this is not to say that the fury owed nothing to my partial awareness that she was right.
Orhan Pamuk
#45. When we reach the point when our lives take on their final shape as in a novel we can identify our happiest moment selecting it in retrospective
Orhan Pamuk
#46. Over time, jealousy becomes an element as indispensable as paint in the life of the master artist.
Orhan Pamuk
#47. To derive pleasure from a novel is to enjoy the act of departing from words and transforming these things into images in our mind.
Orhan Pamuk
#48. If we go to Frankfurt together it won't be long, I'm sure, before I love you. I'm not like you; it takes me longer than two days to fall in love with someone. If you're patient, if you don't break my heart with your Turkish jealousies, I'll love you deeply.
Orhan Pamuk
#49. All great masters, in their work, seek that profound void within color and outside time.
Orhan Pamuk
#50. 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
#51. The sea was as dark as dreams and as deep as sleep
Orhan Pamuk
#52. To avoid disappointment in art, one mustn't treat it as a career.
Orhan Pamuk
#53. Turkish football serves the cause of nationalism, but not of the nation.
Orhan Pamuk
#54. Don't worry - love that blooms this fast is just as fast to wither
Orhan Pamuk
#55. Contrary to what the West seems to think, it is not poverty that brings people like us so close to God. It's the fact that no one is more curious than we are to learn why we are here on earth and what will happen to us in the next world.
Orhan Pamuk
#56. The truly great books are always novels: 'Anna Karenina,' 'The Brothers Karamazov,' 'The Magic Mountain.' Just as with 'Shahnameh,' I browse these books from time to time to remember how a great book works on us or to teach my students at Columbia University.
Orhan Pamuk
#57. Einstein ... even failed physics once, but he'd never thought of giving up school to make a living.
Orhan Pamuk
#58. Turks have a dismissive phrase: he works like a clerk. I have turned this insult around: I am proud to say that I work like a clerk.
Orhan Pamuk
#59. I think it's horrible that we Turks are always seen under the aspect of Islam first. I am constantly asked about religion, and almost always with a negative undercurrent that makes me furious.
Orhan Pamuk
#60. If you think you are better than Stork, then by all means, get hold of me.
Orhan Pamuk
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. Contrary to what is commonly believed, all murderers are men of extreme faith rather than unbelievers.
Orhan Pamuk
#65. It's very gratifying to me to see my works bringing people closer to my country.
Orhan Pamuk
#66. Whatever anybody says, the most important thing in life is to be happy.
Orhan Pamuk
#67. Life can't be all that bad,' i'd think from time to time. 'Whatever happens, i can always take a long walk along the Bosphorus.
Orhan Pamuk
#68. I don't like to make strong statements. I want to write strong novels ... I keep my deep, radical things for my novels.
Orhan Pamuk
#69. To be left with only the trace of a memory is to gaze at an armchair that's still molded to the form of a love who has left never to return: It is to grieve, dear reader, it is to weep.
Orhan Pamuk
#70. To read a novel is to wonder constantly, even at moments when we lose ourselves most deeply in the book: How much of this is fantasy, and how much is real?
Orhan Pamuk
#71. My mood, as I identify with each of my heroes, resembles what I used to feel when I played alone as a child. Like all children, I liked to play make-believe, to put myself in someone else's place and imagine dream worlds in which I was a soldier, a famous soccer player, or a great hero.
Orhan Pamuk
#72. If the soulmate is absent there is no need for the soul
Orhan Pamuk
#73. Ka thought it strangely depressing that the suicide girls had had to struggle to find a private moment to kill themselves. Even after swallowing their pills, even as they lay quietly dying, they'd had to share their rooms with others.
Orhan Pamuk
#74. 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
#75. The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the bus driver.
Orhan Pamuk
#76. The opponents of this process have always tried to vilify westernization as a poor imitation.
Orhan Pamuk
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. Tell me then, does love make one a fool or do only fools fall in love?
Orhan Pamuk
#81. A Good Education Removes the Barriers Between Rich and Poor
Orhan Pamuk
#82. 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
#83. They, like me, like all of us, had, once upon a time, in a past so far away it seemed like heaven, caught by chance a glimpse of an inner essence, only to forget what it was. It was this lost memory that pained us, reduced us to ruins, though still we struggled to be ourselves.
Orhan Pamuk
#84. I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well.
Orhan Pamuk
#85. Being a fiction writer makes you someone who works with irresponsibility.
Orhan Pamuk
#86. 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
#87. The city's more beautiful at night, you know: the people of the night always tell the truth.
Orhan Pamuk
#88. To know is to remember that you've seen.To see is to know without remembering. Thus painting is remembering the blackness.
Orhan Pamuk
#89. If we give what we treasure most to a Being we love with all our hearts, if we can do that without expecting anything in return, then the world becomes a beautiful place.
Orhan Pamuk
#90. I do not believe in a personal connection to God; that's where it gets transcendental.
Orhan Pamuk
#91. Man's sentimental attachment to objects is one of life's greatest consolations.
Orhan Pamuk
#92. Mankind's greatest error, the biggest deception of the past thousand years is this: to confuse poverty with stupidity.
Orhan Pamuk
#94. He could sense the darkness inside him looking for an excuse to manifest itself.
Orhan Pamuk
#95. A museum should not just be a place for fancy paintings but should be a place where we can communicate our lives through our everyday objects.
Orhan Pamuk
#97. We should not judge Islam by terrorists. All civilizations and cultures produce terrorists. Every time there is a flag-burning, killing, or provocative films, I'm worried, not because something radical will happen, and this time, some people are killed. We're very sorry for that.
Orhan Pamuk
#98. Great changes in the direction of peace have often come from people who were no great advocates of peace to begin with.
Orhan Pamuk
#99. 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
#100. I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.
Orhan Pamuk
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top