Orhan Pamuk Quotes & Sayings (Page 8)

“Self-hatred is OK. I have self-hatred, too. It's OK. What's bad is if you don't know how to get out of it, don't know how to manage it. Self-hatred is, in fact, a good thing if you can clearly see the mechanism of it, because it helps you to understand others.”

“'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.”

“To appropriate an invention, be it artistic or technical, you have to have at least a part of your spirit embracing it so radically that you somehow change.”

“We should not judge Islam by terrorists. All civilizations and cultures produce terrorists. Every time there is a flag-burning, killing, or provocative films, I'm worried, not because something radical will happen, and this time, some people are killed. We're very sorry for that.”

“When I write, I feel that I'm writing with my intellect. When I paint, I think it's some other force making me paint. I - as I wrote in my novel 'My Name is Red' - watch with amazement what my hand is doing on the paper, what kind of line, what kind of strange, beautiful thing it's doing in spite of my will, so to speak.”

“When people read a novel 600 pages long, six months pass, and all they will remember are five pages. They don't remember the text - instead, they remember the sensations the text gives them.”

“When the whole world reads your books, is there any other happiness for a writer? I am happy that my books are read in 57 languages. But I am focused on Istanbul not because of Istanbul but because of humanity. Everyone is the same in the end.”