Top 100 Orhan Quotes
#1. It's a great relief for me that no one will ask me anymore: "Orhan, when will you get the Nobel Prize?"
Orhan Pamuk
#2. 'Snow' is my most popular book in the United States. But in Turkey, it was not as popular as 'My Name is Red,' or even 'The Museum of Innocence,' because the secular leaders didn't want this bourgeois Orhan trying to understand these head-scarf girls.
Orhan Pamuk
#3. From a very young age, I suspected there was more to my world than I could see: somewhere in the streets of Istanbul, in a house resembling ours, there lived another Orhan so much like me he could pass for my twin, even my double.
Orhan Pamuk
#4. Orhan fixates on the word genocide. Massacres abound in his country's history, as they do in any nation's history. But genocide is a different accusation altogether. Why do they insist on using that word?
Aline Ohanesian
#5. All of life, Orhan realizes, is a story within a story; how we choose to listen and which words we choose to speak makes all the difference.
Aline Ohanesian
#6. 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
#7. What was venerated as style was nothing more than an imperfection or flaw that revealed the guilty hand.
Orhan Pamuk
#8. I believe strongly in an author's moral responsibility. But his first obligation is to write good books.
Orhan Pamuk
#9. She looked out the window; in her eyes was the light that you see only in children arriving at a new place, or in young people still open to new influences, still curious about the world because they have not yet been scarred by life.
Orhan Pamuk
#10. 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
#13. Well, on the one hand the Turks have the legitimate need to defend their national dignity - and this includes being recognized as a part of the west and Europe.
Orhan Pamuk
#14. The essential reason for my loneliness is that I don't even know where I belong.
Orhan Pamuk
#15. Life is beautiful if you are on the road to somewhere
Orhan Pamuk
#16. I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work.
Orhan Pamuk
#17. 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
#18. Painting taught literature to describe.
Orhan Pamuk
#19. Humanity has one strength that no one has: that is we may feel the feelings, pain, jealousy, failure, love, happiness of others and identify with them, and even see the world through their own eyes.
Orhan Pamuk
#20. I asked him about his enemies. He began to count them. The list went on and on ... - Conversations with Yahya Kemal
Orhan Pamuk
#21. The urbanized life has lead to the destruction of the legends.
Orhan Pamuk
#22. 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
#23. I'm not indignant," I said indignantly.
Orhan Pamuk
#24. The hero of the book does long to experience God. But his conception of God is very western.
Orhan Pamuk
#25. 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
#26. At the end of the day there was nothing to be gained by reminding people that everything that had ever been written, even the greatest and most authoritative texts in the world, were about dreams, not real life, dreams conjured up by words.
Orhan Pamuk
#27. If you wanted to buy anything from Ligor, you'd lower a basket from your floor and then shout
Orhan Pamuk
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. I think less than people think I do about politics. I care about writing.
Orhan Pamuk
#31. When there is not a breath of wind, the waters sometimes shudder as if from inside and take on the finish of washed silk.
Orhan Pamuk
#32. The true collector's only home is his own museum.
Orhan Pamuk
#33. 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
#34. Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.
Orhan Pamuk
#35. When I paint, I definitely live in the present, like someone in a shower whistling or singing.
Orhan Pamuk
#36. People only tell lies when there is something they are terribly frightened of losing.
Orhan Pamuk
#37. A great painter does not content himself by affecting us with his masterpieces; ultimately, he succeeds in changing the landscape of our minds. Once
Orhan Pamuk
#38. Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.
Orhan Pamuk
#39. When 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
#41. Actually, it's the other way round. In a poor country, the only consolation people can have is the one that comes from their beliefs.
Orhan Pamuk
#43. Nothing can be as astounding as life. Except for writing. Yes, of course, except for writing, the sole consolation.
Orhan Pamuk
#44. 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
#45. In a city, you can be alone in a crowd, and in fact what makes the city a city is that it lets you hide the strangeness in your mind inside its teeming multitudes.
Orhan Pamuk
#46. If I see my city as beautiful and bewitching, then my life must be so too.
Orhan Pamuk
#47. I told him just so he wouldn't be fooled by the bright lights of Istanbul into thinking that life was somehow easy.
Orhan Pamuk
#48. I was at the end of my tether when my first book was published. For eight years I didn't make a penny, I worked so hard, didn't drink, didn't enjoy life.
Orhan Pamuk
#49. My fear, which I shared with everyone in the Turkish secular bourgeoisie, was not of God but of the fury of those who believed in Her too much.
Orhan Pamuk
#50. 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.
Orhan Pamuk
#51. I've never left Istanbul, never left the houses, streets, and neighborhoods of my childhood.
Orhan Pamuk
#52. Ka knew very well that life was a meaningless string of random incidents
Orhan Pamuk
#53. Dogs do speak, but only to those who listen
Orhan Pamuk
#54. 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
#55. For the traveler we see leaning on his neighbor is an honest and well-meaning man and full of melancholy, like those Chekhov characters so laden with virtues that they never know success in life.
Orhan Pamuk
#56. 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
#57. But I think it must be easier for a girl to marry someone she doesn't know, because the more you get to know men, the harder it is to love them.
Orhan Pamuk
#58. 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
#59. Age had not made him less handsome, as is so often the case; it had simply made him less visible.
Orhan Pamuk
#60. 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
#61. For if a lover's face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home.
Orhan Pamuk
#62. Expressing one's reality in words, as truthful as they might be, goads one to insincerity.
Orhan Pamuk
#63. My decision to view the world through novels, as it were, which is a typically European way of looking at things, became a heavy burden for me. But I took it on consciously, even though it was torture for me.
Orhan Pamuk
#64. I want to describe the psychological state of the people in a certain city.
Orhan Pamuk
#66. 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
#67. The thing that binds us together is that we have both lowered our expectations of life
Orhan Pamuk
#68. It may not happen in the first instant, but within ten minutes of meeting a man, a woman has a clear idea of who he is, or at least who he might be for her, and her heart of hearts has already told her whether or not she's going to fall in love with him.
Orhan Pamuk
#69. Many great authors of the 19th century wrote under conditions of strict censorship. The great thing about the art of writing a novel, is that you can write about anything. All you have to say is that it's fiction.
Orhan Pamuk
#70. I believe that it isn't victories but defeats that promote nationalism.
Orhan Pamuk
#71. We live but for a short time, we see but very little, and we know almost nothing; so, at least, let's do some dreaming. Have yourself a very good Sunday, my dear readers.
Orhan Pamuk
#72. 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
#73. Museums should no longer concern themselves with history on a grand scale, the sagas of kings and heroes, or the forging of national identities; they should focus instead on the lives and belongings of ordinary people, just as modern novels do.
Orhan Pamuk
#74. Morality is probably the last thing one can learn from football.
Orhan Pamuk
#75. In this night, pure and everlasting, like an old fairy tale, being Turkish felt infinitely better than being poor.
Orhan Pamuk
#76. Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow.
Orhan Pamuk
#77. For a novel need not be full of sorrow just because its heroes are suffering.
Orhan Pamuk
#79. I write a world where everyone is partly right.
Orhan Pamuk
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. The endless repetition of an ordinary miracle.
Orhan Pamuk
#85. Happiness is holding someone in your arms and knowing you hold the whole world.
Orhan Pamuk
#86. Love points the way, empties you of the stuff of life, carries you at last to the mystery of creation.
Orhan Pamuk
#87. 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
#88. The only antidote to the loneliness of the streets was the streets themselves.
Orhan Pamuk
#89. I certainly see myself more as a craftsman than as an artist.
Orhan Pamuk
#90. Snow reminds Ka of God! But I'm not sure it would be accurate. What brings me close to God is the silence of snow.
Orhan Pamuk
#91. First, I would find an object which I would think is suitable for my characters and stories, then write about it, and in the end, I ended up with a house full of thousands of objects.
Orhan Pamuk
#92. The ideal story should begin innocently like a fairy-tale, be frightening like a nightmare in the middle, and conclude sadly like a love story ending in separation.
Orhan Pamuk
#93. 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
#94. Only vulgar people boast about how happy they are
Orhan Pamuk
#95. 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.
Orhan Pamuk
#96. 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
#97. You'll learn it all soon enough . . . You will see everything without being seen. You will hear everything but pretend that you haven't . . . You will walk for ten hours a day but feel like you haven't walked at all.
Orhan Pamuk
#98. This, then, is how we first came across the fearsome secret history of turkey's mannequins.
Orhan Pamuk
#99. One side of me is very busy paying attention to the details of life, the humanity of people, catching the street voices, the middle-class, upper-middle-class secret lives of Turks. The other side is interested in history and class and gender, trying to get all of society in a very realistic way.
Orhan Pamuk
#100. 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
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