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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
Phrases
Optimistic
Turned
Dismissive
Works
Turks
Proud
Clerk
Around
Clerks
Work
Phrase
Like
Insult

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Love is a sacred silence.
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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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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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We're not stupid! We're just poor! And we have a right to insist on this distinction
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In his brilliant new book Pankaj Mishra reverses the long gaze of the West upon the East, showing modern history as it has been felt by the majority of the world's population from Turkey to China. These are the amazing stories of the grandfathers of today's angry Asians. Excellent!
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The real choice we have to make is between peace and nationalism.
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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.
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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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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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As much as I live I shall not imitate them or hate myself for being different to them
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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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Turkish football serves the cause of nationalism, but not of the nation.
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I really don't want to portray the Islamists as simply evil, the way it's often done in the west.
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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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Painting taught literature to describe.
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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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I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well.
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Age had not made him less handsome, as is so often the case it had simply made him less visible.
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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.
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Happiness is holding someone in your arms and knowing you hold the whole world.
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