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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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Orhan Pamuk
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: June 7
Academic
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
İstanbul
Pamuk
Ferit Orhan Pamuk
Optimistic
Turned
Dismissive
Works
Turks
Proud
Clerk
Around
Clerks
Work
Phrase
Like
Insult
Phrases

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The past is always an invented land.
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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.
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The secularists in Turkey haven't underestimated religion, they just made the mistake of believing they could control it with the power of the army alone.
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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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Turkish football serves the cause of nationalism, but not of the nation.
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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.
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Painting taught literature to describe.
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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.
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I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work.
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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.
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Happiness is holding someone in your arms and knowing you hold the whole world.
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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.
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All great masters, in their work, seek that profound void within color and outside time.
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The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the bus driver.
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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?
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When something explosive is kept hidden away, a tension builds within that must ultimately be released.
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The urbanized life has lead to the destruction of the legends.
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The beauty and mystery of this world only emerges through affection, attention, interest and compassion . . . open your eyes wide and actually see this world by attending to its colors, details and irony.
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The first thing I learned at school was that some people are idiots the second thing I learned was that some are even worse.
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Life is short, and we should respect every moment of it.
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