Orhan Pamuk

I write because I have an innate need to write.

Ferit Orhan Pamuk (born June 7, 1952) is a Turkish novellist in the post-modern style. He became one of Turkey's most prominent novellists and was made a cause célèbre in 2005 when he was prosecuted for claiming that the mass killings of Armenians from 1915 were a result of genocide. He was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Quotes

• When another writer in another house is not free, no writer is free.
  • "Freedom to Write", Prague Writer's Festival (May 8, 2006)

• The question we writers are asked most often, the favorite question, is: Why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write. I write because I can’t do normal work as other people do. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can partake of real life only by changing it. I write because I want others, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all life’s beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but—as in a dream—can’t quite get to. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.
  • My Father's Suitcase", Nobel Prize for Literature lecture (December 7, 2006)

My Name Is Red (1998)

Translated by Erdağ Göknar (New York: Vintage International, 2002)

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.

• I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well.
  • I Am a Corpse (p. 3)

• 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.
  • I Am a Corpse (p. 3)

• When you love a city and have explored it frequently on foot, your body, not to mention your soul, gets to know the streets so well after a number of years that in a fit of melancholy, perhaps stirred by a light snow falling ever so sorrowfully, you'll discover your legs carrying you of their own accord toward one of your favorite promontories.
  • I Am Called Black (p. 9)

• The drinking of coffee is an absolute sin! Our Glorious Prophet did not partake of coffee because he knew it dulled the intellect, caused ulcers, hernia and sterility; he understood that coffee was nothing but the Devil's ruse.
  • I Am a Dog (p. 12)

• Try to discover who I am from my choice of words and colors, as attentive people like yourselves might examine footprints to catch a thief.
  • I Will Be Called a Murderer (p. 17)

• Where there is true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity.
  • I Will Be Called a Murderer (p. 18)

• What was venerated as style was nothing more than an imperfection or flaw that revealed the guilty hand.
  • I Will Be Called a Murderer (p. 18)

• Yet does illustrating in a new way signify a new way of seeing?
  • I Am Orhan (p. 28)

• For if a lover's face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home.
  • I Am Called Black (pp. 30-31)

• A letter doesn’t communicate by words alone. A letter, just like a book, can be read by smelling it, touching it and fondling it. Thereby, intelligent folk will say, “Go on then, read what the letter tells you!” whereas the dullwitted will say, “Go on then, read what he’s written!”
  • I Am Esther (p. 37)

• Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.
  • I Am Called Black (p. 59)

• All great masters, in their work, seek that profound void within color and outside time.
  • I Am Called "Olive" (p. 76)

• Tell me then, does love make one a fool or do only fools fall in love?
  • I Am Esther (p. 82)

• Are you an angel that approaching you should be so terrifying?
  • I Am Esther (p. 83)

• The beauty and mystery of this world only emerges through affection, attention, interest and compassion; if you want to live in that paradise where happy mares and stallions live, open your eyes wide and actually see this world by attending to its colors, details and irony.
  • I Will Be Called a Murderer (p. 282)

• Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow.
  • I Am Called Black (p. 339)

• Let me first state forthright that contrary to what we've often read in books and heard from preachers, when you are a woman, you don't feel like the Devil.
  • I Am a Woman (p. 353)

• There are moments in all our lives when we realize, even as we experience them, that we are living through events we will never forget, even long afterward.
  • I Am Called "Olive" (p. 376)

• T feel like the Devil not because I’ve murdered two men, but because my portrait has been made in this fashion.
  • I Will Be Called a Murderer (p. 399)

• Suddenly, it seemed to me that 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.
  • I, Shekure (p. 407)

• 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 precisely what they cannot depict. That’s why they substitute the joy of seeing for the joy of life.
  • I, Shekure (p. 413)

External links

• Orhan Pamuk at Nobelprize.org