For me, Westernization is not about consuming fanciful goods; it’s about a system of free speech, democracy, egalitarianism and respect for the people’s rights and dignity. – Orhan Pamuk
‘The Museum of Innocence’ is not about politics; it’s a love story, but I think it’s political in the sense that it wants to capture how a man suppresses a woman. – Orhan Pamuk
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
People look at me as sort of a diplomat for Turkey, which by nature, I’m not; I don’t want to be. It’s again about that playfulness. Being Turkey’s voice or representative is not playful, it’s not childlike; it makes me self-conscious, kills the child in me. – 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
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
I see Turkey’s future as being in Europe, as one of many prosperous, tolerant, democratic countries. – Orhan Pamuk
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
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
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
At first my publisher had reservations about publishing it in the form you are familiar with. – Orhan Pamuk
The hero of the book does long to experience God. But his conception of God is very western. – 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
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
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
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 have the legacy of my father and his nocturnal automatic waking up. But I like those periods. I immediately have a different vision of humanity and my life. – Orhan Pamuk
‘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
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
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
When I write, I feel that I’m writing with my intellect. When I paint, I think it’s some other force making me paint. I – as I wrote in my novel ‘My Name is Red’ – watch with amazement what my hand is doing on the paper, what kind of line, what kind of strange, beautiful thing it’s doing in spite of my will, so to speak. – 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
At the age of 60, I am less experimental and more mature. I want most of all to convey my understanding of life. – Orhan Pamuk
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. – 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
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
Istanbul is a vast place. There are very conservative neighbourhoods, there are places that are upper class, Westernised, consuming Western culture. – Orhan Pamuk
I have been attacked in Turkey more for my interviews than for my books. Political polemicists and columnists do not read novels there. – Orhan Pamuk