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To read a novel is to wonder constantly, even at moments when we lose ourselves most deeply in the book: How much of this is fantasy, and how much is real?

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
Moments
Deeply
Book
Constantly
Real
Fantasy
Even
Novel
Much
Lose
Loses
Wonder
Read

More quotes by Orhan Pamuk

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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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My religion is complicated. Literature is my true religion. After all, I come from a completely non-religious family.
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When another writer in another house is not free, no writer is free.
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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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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.
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Love is a sacred silence.
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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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...the endless repetition of an ordinary miracle.
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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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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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What is the thing you want most from me? What can I do to make you love me?' Be yourself,' said Ipek.
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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 past is always an invented land.
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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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My diary has its own kind of magic. It gives me the feeling of having accomplished something. On days when I don't have time for this, I feel tortured.
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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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Turkish football serves the cause of nationalism, but not of the nation.
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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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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.
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The real question is how much suffering we've caused our womenfolk by turning headscarves into symbols - and using women as pawns in a political game.
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