Orhan Pamuk
27 quotes
Biography
Ferit Orhan Pamuk is a Turkish novelist, screenwriter, academic, and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. One of Turkey's most prominent novelists, he has sold over 13 million books in 63 languages, making him the country's best-selling writer.
"I consider myself Istanbul's storyteller. My subject matter is my town. I consider it my job to explore the hidden patterns of my city's clandestine corners, its shady, mysterious places, the things I love."
"I read a book one day and my whole life was changed."
"I don't want to be a tree; I want to be its meaning."
"Tell me then, does love make one a fool or do only fools fall in love?"
"Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow."
"Any intelligent person knows that life is a beautiful thing and that the purpose of life is to be happy,"said my father as he watched the three beauties. "But it seems only idiots are ever happy. How can we explain this?"
"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."
"The greatest happiness is when the eye discovers beauty where neither then mind conceived of nor the hand intended any."
"I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Where there is true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity."
"What was venerated as style was nothing more than an imperfection or flaw that revealed the guilty hand."
"Yet does illustrating in a new way signify a new way of seeing?"
"For if a lover's face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home."
"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!”"
"Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight."
"All great masters, in their work, seek that profound void within color and outside time."
"Are you an angel that approaching you should be so terrifying?"
"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."
"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."
"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."
"T feel like the Devil not because I’ve murdered two men, but because my portrait has been made in this fashion."