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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.

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
Haven
Control
Secularists
Mistake
Underestimated
Alone
Turkeys
Religion
Turkey
Power
Believing
Made
Army
Believe
Havens

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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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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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Nationalism stems from catastrophes, whether they are caused by earthquakes or lost wars.
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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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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?
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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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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.
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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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I certainly see myself more as a craftsman than as an artist.
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Mankind's greatest error, the biggest deception of the past thousand years is this: to confuse poverty with stupidity.
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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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Tell me then, does love make one a fool or do only fools fall in love?
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It's very gratifying to me to see my works bringing people closer to my country.
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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
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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 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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Dogs do speak, but only to those who know how to listen.
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How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known?
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I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work.
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