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In a brutal country like ours, where human life is 'cheap', it's stupid to destroy yourself for the sake of your beliefs. Beliefs? High ideas? Only people in rich countries can enjoy such luxuries.

Orhan Pamuk

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Orhan Pamuk
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: June 7
Academic
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
İstanbul
Pamuk
Ferit Orhan Pamuk
Enjoy
Luxury
Ideas
Destroy
Human
Countries
Humans
Sake
Country
Stupid
Luxuries
Life
Rich
Cheap
Like
High
Brutal
People
Belief
Beliefs

More quotes by Orhan Pamuk

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Before my birth there was infinite time, and after my death, inexhaustible time. I never thought of it before: I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darkness.
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For if a lover's face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home.
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Writing my own diary is the best form of remembrance, but only for my own use. I need these notes it's like an impulse.
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Life is beautiful if you are on the road to somewhere
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I sometimes joke that I am the first writer of historical fiction who can look out his window and point to the objects in his novels. I have a view of the entrance to the Bosporus, the old city, Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque.
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...the endless repetition of an ordinary miracle.
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In poetically well built museums, formed from the heart's compulsions, we are consoled not by finding in them old objects that we love, but by losing all sense of Time.
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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.
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We had no desire to live in Istanbul, nor in Paris or New York. Let them have their discos and dollars, their skycrapers and supersonics transports. Let them have their radios and their color TV, hey, we have ours, don't we? But we have something they don't have. Heart. We have heart. Look, look how the light of life seeps into my very heart
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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.
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Hüzün does not just paralyze the inhabitants of Instanbul, it also gives them poetic license to be paralyzed.
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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.
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As much as I live I shall not imitate them or hate myself for being different to them
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My religion is complicated. Literature is my true religion. After all, I come from a completely non-religious family.
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Nationalism stems from catastrophes, whether they are caused by earthquakes or lost wars.
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The past is always an invented land.
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When another writer in another house is not free, no writer is free.
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When Turkey began approaching the EU, I wasn't the only one who worried that the dark stain in Turkey's history - or rather the history of the Ottoman Empire - could become a problem one day. In other words, what happened to the Armenians in World War I. That's why I couldn't leave the issue untouched.
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Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow.
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With the death of my father, it wasn't just the objects of everyday life that had changed even the most ordinary street scenes had become irreplaceable mementos of a lost world whose every detail figured in the meaning of the whole.
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