Orhan Pamuk quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Orhan Pamuk on Wise Famous Quotes.

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.

Are you an angel that approaching you should be so terrifying?

Love is a sacred silence.

What is the thing you want most from me? What can I do to make you love me?'
Be yourself,' said Ipek.

What we essentially want is to draw something unknown to us in all its shadowiness, not something we know in all its illumination.

Istanbul is a vast place. There are very conservative neighbourhoods, there are places that are upper class, Westernised, consuming Western culture.

What makes the marvellous is its peculiar way of being ordinary; what makes the ordinary is its peculiar way of being marvellous.

Man's sentimental attachment to objects is one of life's greatest consolations.

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?

If they spoke, it was in whispers

Writing my own diary is the best form of remembrance, but only for my own use. I need these notes; it's like an impulse.

My hero wants to belong too, but he doesn't want to give up all the things he came to value in the west.

Try to discover who I am from my choice of words and colors, as attentive people like yourselves might examine footprints to catch a thief.

Love is the ability to make the invisible visible and the desire always to feel the invisible in one's midst.

The only antidote to the loneliness of the streets was the streets themselves.

Where there is a true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity.

He could sense the darkness inside him looking for an excuse to manifest itself.

The writer's secret is not inspiration - for it is never clear where it comes from - it is his stubbornness, his patience.

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.

I don't judge my characters.

Am sometimes hard-pressed to explain why I've stayed, not only in the same place but in the same building.

It's a great relief for me that no one will ask me anymore: "Orhan, when will you get the Nobel Prize?"

In a city where men are killing each other like animals just to make it a happier place, who has the right to stop me from killing myself?

The waiting was torture, the worst Ka had ever known. It was this pain, this deadly wait, he now remembered, that had made him afraid to fall in love.

...love is deep attention, deep compassion...

Now everyone is prouder and poorer

We read novels because we want to see the world through other experiences, other beings, other eyes, other cultures.

Happiness means being close to the one you love, that's all. (Taking immediate possession is not necessary.)

I certainly see myself more as a craftsman than as an artist.

Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.

My religion is complicated. Literature is my true religion. After all, I come from a completely non-religious family.

I think less than people think I do about politics. I care about writing.

Only vulgar people boast about how happy they are

Tell me then, does love make one a fool or do only fools fall in love?

As always after drinking too much, I felt like my own ghost trying to take it's first solo walk outside the body.

There was something pretentious about politics when it was taken to extremes.

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.

Dogs do speak, but only to those who listen

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.

The true collector's only home is his own museum.

To avoid disappointment in art, one mustn't treat it as a career.

What is it to be a color? Color is the touch of the eye, music to the deaf, a word out of the darkness.

Don't worry - love that blooms this fast is just as fast to wither

Whatever anybody says, the most important thing in life is to be happy.

Expressing one's reality in words, as truthful as they might be, goads one to insincerity.

People only tell lies when there is something they are terribly frightened of losing.

For a novel need not be full of sorrow just because its heroes are suffering.

Colour is the touch of the eye,
Music to the deaf,
A word out of darkness.

When there is not a breath of wind, the waters sometimes shudder as if from inside and take on the finish of washed silk.

I asked him about his enemies. He began to count them. The list went on and on ... - Conversations with Yahya Kemal

A writer in someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is.

If I see my city as beautiful and bewitching, then my life must be so too.

Nationalism stems from catastrophes, whether they are caused by earthquakes or lost wars.

We fall in love more deeply when we're unhappy.

Down your order.

I've never left Istanbul, never left the houses, streets, and neighborhoods of my childhood.

When another writer in another house is not free, no writer is free.

It's not the content, but the form of thought that counts.

It was as if he were in a place that the whole world had forgotten; as if it were snowing at the end of the world.

I read somewhere that luck is not blind, just illiterate. Luck, I mused, is a palliative for those who don't know probability and statistics.

I like all the disgusting things that are fine just being themselves. What's wrong with a little honest vulgarity?

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.

A person could wish for one thing and speak of another, and their fate, their kismet, was the thing that could bring the two together. Even

I really don't want to portray the Islamists as simply evil, the way it's often done in the west.

Those who can truly see, know.

Love is good for the skin.

The real question is how much suffering we've caused our womenfolk by turning headscarves into symbols - and using women as pawns in a political game.

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.

Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.

When something explosive is kept hidden away, a tension builds within that must ultimately be released.

The hero of the book does long to experience God. But his conception of God is very western.

I don't want to be a tree; I want to be its meaning.

The snow reminded me of the beauty and mystery of creation, of the essential joy that is life.

Immersing oneself in the problems of a book is a good way to keep from thinking of love.

There's been quite a clear upswing in nationalist sentiments. Everyone is talking about it, in Turkey as well.

Where there's a lot of money to be made, there's also a lot of blood to be spilled.

The gap between compassion and surrender is love's darkest, deepest region.

Contrary to what is commonly believed, all murderers are men of extreme faith rather than unbelievers.

As much as I live I shall not imitate them or hate myself for being different to them

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.

If you wanted to buy anything from Ligor, you'd lower a basket from your floor and then shout

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.

I don't like to make strong statements. I want to write strong novels ... I keep my deep, radical things for my novels.

The city's more beautiful at night, you know: the people of the night always tell the truth.

To know is to remember that you've seen.To see is to know without remembering. Thus painting is remembering the blackness.

The opponents of this process have always tried to vilify westernization as a poor imitation.

I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.

The fueling of anti-Turkish sentiment in Europe is resulting in an anti-European, indiscriminate nationalism in Turkey.

Despite the loss they were suffering, they'd both relaxed - as people do when they realize they've run out of chances for happiness

The greatest happiness is when the eye discovers beauty where neither then mind conceived of nor the hand intended any.

Heaven was the place where you kept alive the dreams of your memories.

Morality is probably the last thing one can learn from football.

I always enjoy impersonating my characters in the first-person singular.

Life is short, and we should respect every moment of it.

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,

If you think you are better than Stork, then by all means, get hold of me.

I told him just so he wouldn't be fooled by the bright lights of Istanbul into thinking that life was somehow easy.

I have hired a bodyguard, on the recommendation of my friends and the government. It's outrageous, having to live like this.

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.

Only imbeciles are innocent.