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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.

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
Reality
Blinds
Things
Malady
Love
Longing
Like
Realized
Already
Forget
Makes
Art
Obscuring

More quotes by Orhan Pamuk

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All great masters, in their work, seek that profound void within color and outside time.
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What was venerated as style was nothing more than an imperfection or flaw that revealed the guilty hand.
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I see Turkey's future as being in Europe, as one of many prosperous, tolerant, democratic countries.
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Time had not faded my memories (as I had prayed to God it might), nor had it healed my wounds as it is said always to do. I began each day with the hope that the next day would be better, my recollections a little less pointed, but I would awake to the same pain, as if a black lamp were burning eternally inside me, radiating darkness.
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In actuality, we don't look for smiles in pictures of bliss, but rather, for the happiness in life itself. Painters know this, but this is preciously what they cannot depict. That's why they substitute the joy of seeing for the joy of life.
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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.
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Sometimes I would see them not as mementos of the blissful hours but as the tangible precious debris of the storm raging in my soul.
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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.
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Life can't be all that bad,' i'd think from time to time. 'Whatever happens, i can always take a long walk along the Bosphorus.
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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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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.
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...the endless repetition of an ordinary miracle.
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Snow reminds Ka of God! But I’m not sure it would be accurate. What brings me close to God is the silence of snow.
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.
Orhan Pamuk
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Life is short, and we should respect every moment of it.
Orhan Pamuk
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The image that I remember most of all is of the Fenerbahçe players storming into the stadium before kickoff. They were called the canaries because of their yellow jerseys. It was as if they, like canaries, were fluttering into the stadium out of a hole. I loved it. It was poetry.
Orhan Pamuk
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The real choice we have to make is between peace and nationalism.
Orhan Pamuk
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Of course in Turkey I'm seen as being on the 'Western' side, criticised by the nationalists, criticised by the communitarians as not belonging. Even, sometimes, criticised for looking at my country through Western eyes. And in the Western media I'm portrayed as belonging to the East.
Orhan Pamuk
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As much as I live I shall not imitate them or hate myself for being different to them
Orhan Pamuk
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It may not happen in the first instant, but within ten minutes of meeting a man, a woman has a clear idea of who he is, or at least who he might be for her, and her heart of hearts has already told her whether or not she's going to fall in love with him.
Orhan Pamuk