Quotes from 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.

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.

I write a world where everyone is partly right.

My home is attached to a study - in fact, my home is my study, and I have a little room to sleep in. I need to write looking onto the street or a landscape. Looking at reality from some distance gives me romantic visions.

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.

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.

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.

If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my entire life, I am most surprised by those moments when I have felt as if the sentences, dreams, and pages that have made me so ecstatically happy have not come from my own imagination - that another power has found them and generously presented them to me.

Without patience and the skill of a craftsman, even the greatest talent is wasted.

A novelist is essentially a person who covers distance through his patience, slowly, like an ant. A novelist impresses us not by his demonic and romantic vision, but by his patience.

The real choice we have to make is between peace and nationalism.

Those who can truly see, know.

Censorship should never be allowed. One should be able to say anything. But I refuse to let politics be foisted on me.

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.

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.

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

We live but for a short time, we see but very little, and we know almost nothing; so, at least, let's do some dreaming. Have yourself a very good Sunday, my dear readers.

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

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

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

For if a lover's face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home.

National consciousness is truly a miraculous thing. When I am not in Turkey I feel even more Turkish than in Istanbul. But when I'm home my European side becomes more apparent.

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.

'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.