Orhan Pamuk Quotes

Orhan Pamuk speaks earnestly about the writer's inner drive and love of reading.

13 quotes

  1. The question we writers are asked most often, the favorite question, is: Why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write. I write because I can't do normal work as other people do. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can partake of real life only by changing it. I write because I want others, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all life's beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but-as in a dream-can't quite get to. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.

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

  3. The writers secret is not inspiration - for it is never clear where it comes from - it is his stubbornness, his patience.

  4. We fall in love more deeply when were unhappy.

  5. We fall in love more deeply when we're unhappy.

  6. I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work.

  7. I really don't want to portray the Islamists as simply evil, the way it's often done in the west.

  8. I am proud to be a Turk, and to write in Turkish about Turkey - and to have been translated into about 40 languages. But I don't want to politicize things by dramatizing them.

  9. I don't want to be a tree; I want to be its meaning.

  10. I need a moment of time for myself every day, like a child playing with his things. When I travel, I routinely find a quiet place, open my diary and write something in it.

  11. Love is a sacred silence.

  12. Let me first state forthright that contrary to what we've often read in books and heard from preachers, when you are a woman, you don't feel like the Devil.

  13. A writer in someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is.