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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

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
Life
Color
Istanbul
Desire
Disco
Light
Transport
Live
Hey
Look
Paris
Looks
Radio
Seeps
Heart
Dollars
Radios
Something
York
Transports

More quotes by Orhan Pamuk

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My religion is complicated. Literature is my true religion. After all, I come from a completely non-religious family.
Orhan Pamuk
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My childhood proved to me that there could be no enjoyment of football without community. But it becomes difficult when this community is having problems with its identity. That's when we experience all possible forms of nationalist exaggeration.
Orhan Pamuk
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Most of the time it's not the Europeans who belittle us. What happens when we look at them is that we belittle ourselves. When we undertake the pilgrimage, it's not just to escape the tyranny at home but also to reach to the depths of our souls. The day arrives when the guilty must return to save those who could not find the courage to leave.
Orhan Pamuk
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Mankind's greatest error, the biggest deception of the past thousand years is this: to confuse poverty with stupidity.
Orhan Pamuk
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The entire world was like a palace with countless rooms whose doors opened into one another. We were able to pass from one room to the next only by exercising our memories and imaginations, but most of us, in our laziness, rarely exercised these capacities, and forever remained in the same room.
Orhan Pamuk
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More than anything I am a novelist. But for me, an author's job is not only to create linguistically accomplished works. As an author I also want to stimulate discussion.
Orhan Pamuk
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Happiness is holding someone in your arms and knowing you hold the whole world.
Orhan Pamuk
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I certainly see myself more as a craftsman than as an artist.
Orhan Pamuk
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Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among themselves, transforming my head into an orchestra pit where different musical instruments sounded out, and I would realize that I could endure this life because of these musicales going on in my head.
Orhan Pamuk
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Turks have a dismissive phrase: he works like a clerk. I have turned this insult around: I am proud to say that I work like a clerk.
Orhan Pamuk
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Istanbul is certainly in the process of transforming itself into an attractive cultural, tourist and financial center. But there are also millions of sad stories in this giant sea of immigration, poverty, misery and contradictions. So much anger, frustration and fury.
Orhan Pamuk
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It's a great relief for me that no one will ask me anymore: Orhan, when will you get the Nobel Prize?
Orhan Pamuk
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When another writer in another house is not free, no writer is free.
Orhan Pamuk
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I am a highly disciplined person. I get up at seven every morning and, still in my pajamas, sit down at my desk where my checkered ring binders and my fountain pen are ready for use. I try to write two pages every day.
Orhan Pamuk
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The past is always an invented land.
Orhan Pamuk
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In Europe the rich are refined enough to act as if they're not wealthy. That is how civilized people behave. If you ask me, being cultured and civilized is not about everyone being free and equal it's about everyone being refined enough to act as if they were. Then no one has to feel guilty.
Orhan Pamuk
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How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known?
Orhan Pamuk
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Turkish football serves the cause of nationalism, but not of the nation.
Orhan Pamuk
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The challenge is to lend conviction even to the voices which advocate views I find personally abhorrent, whether they are political Islamists or officers justifying a coup.
Orhan Pamuk
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I'm a relatively disciplined writer who composes the whole book before beginning to execute and write it. Of course, you can't hold - you cannot imagine a whole novel before you write it there are limits to human memory and imagination. Lots of things come to your mind as you write a book, but again, I make a plan, chapter, know the plot.
Orhan Pamuk