Orhan Pamuk 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. — Orhan Pamuk

Are you an angel that approaching you should be so terrifying? — Orhan Pamuk

Mankind's greatest error, the biggest deception of the past thousand years is this: to confuse poverty with stupidity. — Orhan Pamuk

People who make fun of everything can never truly fall in love, nor truly believe in God. — Orhan Pamuk

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

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

I am so fortunate to be red! I'm fiery. I'm strong. I know men take notice of me and that I cannot be resisted. — Orhan Pamuk

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

If they spoke, it was in whispers — Orhan Pamuk

Being a fiction writer makes you someone who works with irresponsibility. — Orhan Pamuk

Read them, read and learn, because there's so much to do, you know. — Orhan Pamuk

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. — Orhan Pamuk

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

Happiness is holding someone in your arms and knowing you hold the whole world. — Orhan Pamuk

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

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

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

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

Only imbeciles are innocent. — Orhan Pamuk

Enjoyment of football is part of the social context, and I have lost my faith in this social context. — Orhan Pamuk

The essential reason for my loneliness is that I don't even know where I belong. — Orhan Pamuk

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

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

It's very gratifying to me to see my works bringing people closer to my country. — Orhan Pamuk

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

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

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

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

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

I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well. — Orhan Pamuk

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

Great changes in the direction of peace have often come from people who were no great advocates of peace to begin with. — Orhan Pamuk

What was venerated as style was nothing more than an imperfection or flaw that revealed the guilty hand. — Orhan Pamuk

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

It's everywhere," he said. "No matter where you go, it grabs you by the collar. — Orhan Pamuk

Although everyone knew it as freedom from the laws of Islam, no one was quite sure what else westernization was good for. — Orhan Pamuk

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

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

I believe strongly in an author's moral responsibility. But his first obligation is to write good books. — Orhan Pamuk

After all, a woman who doesn't love cats is never going to be make a man happy. — Orhan Pamuk

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

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

I do not believe in a personal connection to God; that's where it gets transcendental. — Orhan Pamuk

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

Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow. — Orhan Pamuk

The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the bus driver. — Orhan Pamuk

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

The urbanized life has lead to the destruction of the legends. — Orhan Pamuk

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

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. — Orhan Pamuk

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

[N]othing is as surprising as life. Except for writing. Except for writing. Yes, of course, except for writing, the only consolation. — Orhan Pamuk

I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work. — Orhan Pamuk

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

No one recognises the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it — Orhan Pamuk

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

The thing that binds us together is that we have both lowered our expectations of life — Orhan Pamuk

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

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

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

To derive pleasure from a novel is to enjoy the act of departing from words and transforming these things into images in our mind. — Orhan Pamuk

Happiness is laughing together... — Orhan Pamuk

Einstein ... even failed physics once, but he'd never thought of giving up school to make a living. — Orhan Pamuk

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

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

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

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

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

Women kill themselves because they hope to gain something," said Kadife. "Men kill themselves because they've lost hope of gaining anything. — Orhan Pamuk

I write a world where everyone is partly right. — Orhan Pamuk

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

In this night, pure and everlasting, like an old fairy tale, being Turkish felt infinitely better than being poor. — Orhan Pamuk

Sometimes I would see them not as mementos of the blissful hours but as the tangible precious debris of the storm raging in my soul. — Orhan Pamuk

When we reach the point when our lives take on their final shape as in a novel we can identify our happiest moment selecting it in retrospective — Orhan Pamuk

It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn't know it. — Orhan Pamuk

Love is good for the skin. — Orhan Pamuk

When another writer in another house is not free, no writer is free. — Orhan Pamuk

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

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

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. — Orhan Pamuk

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

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 — Orhan Pamuk

For if a lover's face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home. — 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 want to describe the psychological state of the people in a certain city. — Orhan Pamuk

Those who can truly see, know. — Orhan Pamuk

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

The first thing I learned at school was that some people are idiots; the second thing I learned was that some are even worse. — Orhan Pamuk

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. — Orhan Pamuk

I believe that it isn't victories but defeats that promote nationalism. — Orhan Pamuk

Age had not made him less handsome, as is so often the case; it had simply made him less visible. — Orhan Pamuk

This, then, is how we first came across the fearsome secret history of turkey's mannequins. — Orhan Pamuk

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

Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space. — Orhan Pamuk

If the soulmate is absent there is no need for the soul — Orhan Pamuk

The sea was as dark as dreams and as deep as sleep — Orhan Pamuk

Big proclamations about honor are really just excuses invented to let people kill each other with a clear conscience. — Orhan Pamuk