Quotes by Orhan Pamuk

About Orhan Pamuk:

Ferit Orhan Pamuk is a Turkish novelist, screenwriter, academic and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. One of Turkey's most prominent novelists, his work has sold over eleven million books in sixty languages, making him the country's best-selling writer.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

As I was looking at myself in the bathroom mirror, it occurred to me that if all else failed, a man could at least kiss himself, and I stared in to the mirror, conjuring up the memory of the couple in the film. I couldn't get the image of their lips ...

Orhan Pamuk

...at the end of the day there was nothing to be gained by reminding people that everything that had ever been written, even the greatest and most authoritative texts in the world, were about dreams, not real life, dreams conjured up by words.

Orhan Pamuk

They, like me, like all of us, had, once upon a time, in a past so far away it seemed like heaven, caught by chance a glimpse of an inner essence, only to forget what it was. It was this lost memory that pained us, reduced us to ruins, though still w...

Orhan Pamuk

To be left with only the trace of a memory is to gaze at an armchair that's still molded to the form of a love who has left never to return: It is to grieve, dear reader, it is to weep.

Orhan Pamuk

From a very young age, I suspected there was more to my world than I could see: somewhere in the streets of Istanbul, in a house resembling ours, there lived another Orhan so much like me he could pass for my twin, even my double.

Orhan Pamuk

At the age of 60, I am less experimental and more mature. I want most of all to convey my understanding of life.

Orhan Pamuk

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 fa...

Orhan Pamuk

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.

Orhan Pamuk

I would be pleased if someone would invent a pill to remove my impatience, moodiness, and occasional bursts of anger. But if they did, I wouldn't be able to write my novels or paint.

Orhan Pamuk

I strongly believe that the art of the novel works best when the writer identifies with whoever he or she is writing about. Novels in the end are based on the human capacity, compassion, and I can show more compassion to my characters if I write in a...

Orhan Pamuk

If a writer is to tell his own story - tell it slowly, and as if it were a story about other people - if he is to feel the power of the story rise up inside him, if he is to sit down at a table and patiently give himself over to this art - this craft...

Orhan Pamuk

My fear was not the fear of God but, as in the case of the whole Turkish secular bourgeoisie, fear of the anger of those who believe in God too zealously(...) I experienced the guilt complex as something personal, originated less from the fear of dis...

Orhan Pamuk

We don't need more museums that try to construct the historical narratives of a society, community, team, nation, state, tribe, company, or species. We all know that the ordinary, everyday stories of individuals are riches, more humane, and much more...

Orhan Pamuk

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

Orhan Pamuk

Remembering the past always comes with an image or a view attached.

Orhan Pamuk

Because, as I would always tell myself so many years later, lying here in my bed: You can't start out again in life, that's a carriage ride you only take once, but with a book in your hand, no matter how confusing and perplexing it might be, once you...

Orhan Pamuk

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

Orhan Pamuk

Believing that Sibel was saying these things to me to make me angry, I got angry. But this is not to say that the fury owed nothing to my partial awareness that she was right.

Orhan Pamuk

I realized that the longing for art, like the longing for love, is a malady that blinds us, and makes us forget the things we already know, obscuring reality.

Orhan Pamuk

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

Orhan Pamuk

Author Bio

  • NameOrhan Pamuk
  • DescriptionTurkish novelist, screenwriter, and Nobel Prize in Literature recipient
  • AliasesPamuk
  • BornJune 7, 1952
  • CountryTurkey
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist; Screenwriter; Essayist
  • WorksThe White Castle; The Black Book; The New Life; My Name Is Red; Snow; Istanbul: Memories And The City; The Museum Of Innocence
  • AwardsNobel Prize In Literature; Officer Of The Legion Of Honour; Peace Prize Of The German Book Trade; Prix Du Meilleur Livre Étranger; Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; International Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival Award For Best Original Screenplay; Grinzane Cavour Prize; International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; Prix Médicis; Ovid Prize; Norman Mailer Prize