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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 -
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
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Language is me, in a way. Really, I feel it.
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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
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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 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 -
I think less than people think I do about politics. I care about writing.
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 -
I always enjoy impersonating my characters in the first-person singular.
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
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I consider myself Istanbul's storyteller. My subject matter is my town. I consider it my job to explore the hidden patterns of my city's clandestine corners, its shady, mysterious places, the things I love.
Orhan Pamuk -
When I paint, I definitely live in the present, like someone in a shower whistling or singing.
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 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 -
The hero of the book does long to experience God. But his conception of God is very western.
Orhan Pamuk -
I write a world where everyone is partly right.
Orhan Pamuk
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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 -
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 -
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 -
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