Orhan Pamuk Quotes

...it seemed to me that the entire world was like a palace with countless rooms whose doors opened i...

Maybe you've heard the story of the man who was so driven by this curiosity that he roamed among sol...

Let me first state forthright that contrary to what we've often read in books and heard from preache...

Yet does illustrating in a new way signify a new way of seeing?

What we essentially want is to draw something unknown to us in all its shadowiness, not something we...

Contrary to what is commonly believed, all murderers are men of extreme faith rather than unbeliever...

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

Maybe you've understood by now that for men like myself, that is, melancholy men for whom love, agon...

The beauty and mystery of this world only emerges through affection, attention, interest and compass...

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

…he quit drinking coffee, and naturally, his brain stopped working.

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

In the cities of the European Franks, women roam about exposing not only their faces, but also their...

To write is to transform that inward gaze into words, to study the worlds into which we pass when we...

My prolonged study of these photographs led me to appreciate the importance of perserving certain mo...

In our household doubts more troubling than these were suffered in silence. The spiritual void I hav...

My fear was not the fear of God but, as in the case of the whole Turkish secular bourgeoisie, fear o...

The only antidote to the loneliness of the streets was the streets themselves.

A novelist is essentially a person who covers distance through his patience, slowly, like an ant. A ...

We read novels because we want to see the world through other experiences, other beings, other eyes,...

I wanted to tell a romantic and dark side of Ottoman history that was also slightly political, sayin...

I must be myself, I said over and over. I must forget these people buzzing inside my head, I must fo...

As I was looking at myself in the bathroom mirror, it occurred to me that if all else failed, a man ...

...at the end of the day there was nothing to be gained by reminding people that everything that had...

To be left with only the trace of a memory is to gaze at an armchair that's still molded to the form...

They, like me, like all of us, had, once upon a time, in a past so far away it seemed like heaven, c...

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

We don't need more museums that try to construct the historical narratives of a society, community, ...

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

In Europe the rich are refined enough to act as if they're not wealthy. That is how civilized people...

Sometimes I would see them not as mementos of the blissful hours but as the tangible precious debris...

I realized that the longing for art, like the longing for love, is a malady that blinds us, and make...

After all, isn't the purpose of the novel, or of a museum, for that matter, to relate our memories w...

Any intelligent person knows that life is a beautiful thing and that the purpose of life is to be ha...

The real question is how much suffering we've caused our womenfolk by turning headscarves into symbo...

Time had not faded my memories (as I had prayed to God it might), nor had it healed my wounds as it ...

With the death of my father, it wasn't just the objects of everyday life that had changed; even the ...

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

The gap between compassion and surrender is love’s darkest, deepest region.

In fact no one recognizes the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it. It may well be t...

Clocks and calendars do not exist to remind us of the Time we've forgotten but to regulate our relat...

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

The power of things inheres in the memories they gather up inside them, and also in the vicissitudes...

Believing that Sibel was saying these things to me to make me angry, I got angry. But this is not to...

This is the greatest consolation in life. In poetically well-built museums, formed from the heart's ...

These were innocent people, so innocent that they thought poverty a crime that wealth would allow th...

She looked out the window; in her eyes was the light that you see only in children arriving at a new...

When two people love each other as we do, no one can come between them, no one," I said, amazed at t...

Eventually, we come to love certain novels because we have expended so much imaginative labor on the...

My mood, as I identify with each of my heroes, resembles what I used to feel when I played alone as ...

To read a novel is to wonder constantly, even at moments when we lose ourselves most deeply in the b...

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

Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among th...

Life is beautiful if you are on the road to somewhere

ต่อให้คุณเชื่อในพระเจ้าจริง มันจะไปได้เรื่องได้ราวอะไรถ้าคุณเชื่ออยู่คนเดียว คุณจะต้องเชื่อในพระเจ้า...

วันหนึ่งในฤดูหนาว สมัยที่คุณเป็นนักเรียนมัธยม หิมะกำลังตก คุณกำลังครุ่นคิดอะไรบางอย่างจนลืมสิ่งอื่น ...

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

Women kill themselves because they hope to gain something," said Kadife. "Men kill themselves becaus...

Suddenly Ka realized he was in love with İpek. And realizing that this love would determine the rest...

Most of the time it's not the Europeans who belittle us. What happens when we look at them is that w...

A man could be at the coffee-house every evening laughing and playing cards with his friends, he cou...

How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another heart? How much can we hope to understa...

...in a brutal country like ours where human life is cheap, it's stupid to destroy yourself for the ...

What was the difference between love and the agony of waiting? Like love, the agony of waiting began...

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

...when a good poet is confronted with difficult facts that he knows to be true but also are inimica...

Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.

There are two kinds of Communists: the arrogant ones, who enter the fray hoping to make men out of t...

Heroic dreams are the consolation of the unhappy. After all, when people like us say we're being her...

นายไม่ไว้ใจคนที่ไม่ชอบยุ่งเกี่ยวกับใคร มีแนวคิดแบบตะวันตก ขณะเดียวกันก็มีความเชื่อในพระเจ้าในแบบของต...

ผมเคยเปิดสารานุกรมดูแล้ว คำว่า atheist มาจากคำภาษากรีกว่า athos แต่คำนี้ ไม่ได้หมายถึงคนที่ไม่เชื่อใ...

It's such a shame that we know so little about our own country, that we can't find it in our hearts ...

The knowledge that she could learn to love a man had always meant more to her than loving him effort...

Ka found it very soothing: for the first time in years, he felt part of a family. In spite of the tr...

Despite the loss they were suffering, they'd both relaxed - as people do when they realize they've r...

In a brutal country like ours, where human life is 'cheap', it's stupid to destroy yourself for the ...

The knowledge that she could learn to love a man had always meant more to her than loving him effort...

Because, as I would always tell myself so many years later, lying here in my bed: You can't start ou...

Perhaps one day someone from a distant land will listen to this story of mine. Isn't this what lies ...

Contrary to what the West seems to think, it is not poverty that brings people like us so close to G...

'The Museum of Innocence' is not about politics; it's a love story, but I think it's political in th...

If a writer is to tell his own story - tell it slowly, and as if it were a story about other people ...

The writer's secret is not inspiration - for it is never clear where it comes from - it is his stubb...

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

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

I believe in a world where there are no heroes, and I've read and know humanity a lot. There are mom...

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

What is the meaning of it all, of this...of this world?'Mystery', I heard in my thoughts, or perhaps...

I don't look at emails, Internet or newspapers before 1 P.M. I wake at 7 A.M., eat fruit, drink tea ...

Good fiction is about asserting the beauties of the world, inventing a new, positive thing. Where am...

If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my entire life, I am most surprised by those mo...

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and t...

When the whole world reads your books, is there any other happiness for a writer? I am happy that my...

When, after hours of lovemaking, we quickly dressed and leftthe apartment, I sometimes thought that ...

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

I don't much care whether rural Anatolians or Istanbul secularists take power. I'm not close to any ...

I have always thought that the place where you sleep or the place you share with your partner should...

Those who can truly see, know.

Authoritarianism, an unrealistic occidental imagination - these issues will never be settled. Turkey...

...and awakening, at that moment, to the thrilling prospect of complete surrender, not just of one’s...

I asked him about his enemies. He began to count them. The list went on and on...." - Conversations ...