Quotes from Orhan Pamuk

All the happiness and beauty that life had to offer only revealed themselves when his mind drifted off into fantasies of a world far removed from his own.

no one recognises the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it

Ninguna vida se parece a otra!... Cada historia es una historia precisamente porque no existe otra igual.

If the soulmate is absent there is no need for the soul

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

De hecho, ¿qué es leer sino dibujar en el silencioso cinematógrafo de nuestra mente una de las cosas que el escritor nos describe con letras?

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

I was supposed to be part of a story, but I fell from there like a leaf in autumn.

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.

Happiness is laughing together...

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.

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

When I was far from Füsun, the world troubled me; it was a puzzle whose pieces were all out of place. The moment I saw her, they all fit back together, reminding me that the world was a beautiful, meaningful whole where I could relax.

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

At the heart of the novelist's craft lies an optimism which thinks that the knowledge we gather from our everyday experience, if given proper form, can become valuable knowledge about reality.

Love is good for the skin.

With the engine stalled, we would notice the deep silence reigning in the park around us, in the summer villa before us, in the world everywhere. We would listen enchanted to the whirring of an insect beginning vernal flight before the onset of spring, and we would know what a wondrous thing it was to be alive in a park on a spring day in Istanbul.

Conrad,Nabokov, Naipaul - these are writers known for having managed to migrate between languages, cultures, countries, continents, even civilizations. Their imaginations were fed by exile, a nourishment drawn not through roots but through rootlessness. My imagination however, requires that I stay in the same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul's fate is my fate. I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am.

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.

Perhaps one day someone from a distant land will listen to this story of mine. Isn't this what lies behind the desire to be inscribed in the pages of a book? Isn't it just for the sake of this delight that sultans and viziers proffer bags of gold to have their histories written?

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

big proclamations about honor are really just excuses invented to let people kill each other with a clear conscience.

Es algo sabido que la vida no está predeterminada y que todas las historias son una cadena de casualidades. Pero incluso los que son conscientes de esa realidad, cuando llega cierto momento de su existencia y miran atrás, llegan a la conclusión de que lo que vivieron como casualidades no fueron sino hechos inevitables.

Eventually, we come to love certain novels because we have expended so much imaginative labor on them. This is why we hang on to those novels, whose pages are creased and dog-eared.