I sometimes feel nervous because I give stupid answers to certain pointless questions. It happens in Turkish as much as in English. I speak bad Turkish and utter stupid sentences. – Orhan Pamuk
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
My hero wants to belong too, but he doesn’t want to give up all the things he came to value in the west. – Orhan Pamuk
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. – Orhan Pamuk
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
I write because I have an innate need to. I write because I can’t do normal work. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can partake of real life only by changing it. – Orhan Pamuk
There’s been quite a clear upswing in nationalist sentiments. Everyone is talking about it, in Turkey as well. – Orhan Pamuk
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
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
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. – Orhan Pamuk
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
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
The habit of collecting, of attachment to things, is an essential human trait. But Western civilization put collecting on a pedestal by inventing museums. Museums are about representing power. It could be the king’s power or, later, people’s power. – Orhan Pamuk
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
The secularists in Turkey haven’t underestimated religion, they just made the mistake of believing they could control it with the power of the army alone. – Orhan Pamuk
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
The opponents of this process have always tried to vilify westernization as a poor imitation. – Orhan Pamuk
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