Quotes from Orhan Pamuk

I was at the end of my tether when my first book was published. For eight years I didn't make a penny, I worked so hard, didn't drink, didn't enjoy life.

I work seven days a week, from 9 in the morning till 8 at night. I have the titles of the next eight novels I want to write. I feel myself pitiable, degraded on a day that I don't write.

All great masters, in their work, seek that profound void within color and outside time.

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

The fictive structure, my work, my imagination, my books are about the details, the huge construction about culture, Islamic culture or modern Turkey. They're all intertwined.

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

I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darknness.

Well, on the one hand the Turks have the legitimate need to defend their national dignity - and this includes being recognized as a part of the west and Europe.

The sea was as dark as dreams and as deep as sleep.

True literature is more than just a story someone has told. It must provide the reader with the essence of the world on a moral, philosophical and emotional level.

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

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

I see Turkey's future as being in Europe, as one of many prosperous, tolerant, democratic countries.

In fact, my entire childhood consisted of looking at photographs in which the viewer sees the ball behind the line, looking through the goal net, and the poor goalkeeper in front of the net.

I see Turkey's future as being in Europe, as one of many prosperous, tolerant, democratic countries.

The writer who shuts himself up in a room and first goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature's eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people's stories, and to tell other people's stories as if they were his own, for this is what literature is.

There are moments in all our lives when we realize, even as we experience them, that we are living through events we will never forget, even long afterward.

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

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

How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known?

Dogs do speak, but only to those who know how to listen.

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

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