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

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
Imagination
Pain
Need
Needs
Work
Make
Loneliness

More quotes by 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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My hero wants to belong too, but he doesn't want to give up all the things he came to value in the west.
Orhan Pamuk
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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.
Orhan Pamuk
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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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The writers secret is not inspiration - for it is never clear where it comes from - it is his stubbornness, his patience.
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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It was in Cihangir that i first learned Istanbul was not an anonymous multitude of walled-in lives - a jungle of apartments where no one knew who was dead or who was celebrating what - but an archipelago of neighbourhoods in which everyone knew each other.
Orhan Pamuk
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What was venerated as style was nothing more than an imperfection or flaw that revealed the guilty hand.
Orhan Pamuk
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...a nation could change its way of life, its history, its technology, its art, literature, and culture, but it would never have a real chance to change its gestures.
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
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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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I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well.
Orhan Pamuk
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It is not my intention to explain Turkey, its culture and its problems. My literature has a universal concern: I want to bring people and their emotions closer to my readers, not explain Turkish politics.
Orhan Pamuk
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I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.
Orhan Pamuk
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The past is always an invented land.
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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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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It's very gratifying to me to see my works bringing people closer to my country.
Orhan Pamuk
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Nationalism stems from catastrophes, whether they are caused by earthquakes or lost wars.
Orhan Pamuk
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When another writer in another house is not free, no writer is free.
Orhan Pamuk