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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.
Orhan Pamuk
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Orhan Pamuk
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: June 7
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İstanbul
Pamuk
Ferit Orhan Pamuk
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More quotes by Orhan Pamuk
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.
Orhan Pamuk
The bloody years of war and all the atrocities in European history have taught the Europeans that secular politics free of religious hatred is mainly a question of peace. This concept is not anchored in the same way in the consciousness of Turks, which has to do with the fact that the secular was forced upon us by the army.
Orhan Pamuk
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
Orhan Pamuk
My religion is complicated. Literature is my true religion. After all, I come from a completely non-religious family.
Orhan Pamuk
The past is always an invented land.
Orhan Pamuk
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.
Orhan Pamuk
In fact, my entire childhood consisted of looking at photographs in which the viewer sees the ball behind the line, looking through the goal net, and the poor goalkeeper in front of the net.
Orhan Pamuk
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
Great changes in the direction of peace have often come from people who were no great advocates of peace to begin with.
Orhan Pamuk
I consider myself a person who comes from a Muslim culture. In any case, I would not say that I'm an atheist. So I'm a Muslim who associates historical and cultural identification with this religion.
Orhan Pamuk
In poetically well built museums, formed from the heart's compulsions, we are consoled not by finding in them old objects that we love, but by losing all sense of Time.
Orhan Pamuk
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!
Orhan Pamuk
Turkish football serves the cause of nationalism, but not of the nation.
Orhan Pamuk
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
If Turkey become a member of the EU, of course Turks would lose a part of this identity, just as Europe would lose a part of its own. It would also be a different Europe then. Accepting Turkey into the EU is an ambitious political endeavor of historical proportions. Europe would become a strong, multi-religious unit.
Orhan Pamuk
Well, on the one hand the Turks have the legitimate need to defend their national dignity - and this includes being recognized as a part of the west and Europe.
Orhan Pamuk
And before long , the msuic , the views rushing past the window , my fathers voice and the narrow cobblestone streets all merged into one , and it seemed to me that while we would never find answers to these fundamental questions , it was good for us to ask them anyway . pg. 284
Orhan Pamuk
Istanbul is certainly in the process of transforming itself into an attractive cultural, tourist and financial center. But there are also millions of sad stories in this giant sea of immigration, poverty, misery and contradictions. So much anger, frustration and fury.
Orhan Pamuk
Painting taught literature to describe.
Orhan Pamuk
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.
Orhan Pamuk
