Orhan Pamuk Quotes

78 Sourced Quotes

Ka thought it strangely depressing that the suicide girls had had to struggle to find a private moment to kill themselves. Even after swallowing their pills, even as they lay quietly dying, they'd had to share their rooms with others.

Orhan Pamuk
All great masters, in their work, seek that profound void within color and outside time.

Orhan Pamuk
Actually, it's the other way round. In a poor country, the only consolation people can have is the one that comes from their beliefs.

Orhan Pamuk
Heroic dreams are the consolation of the unhappy. After all, when people like us say we're being heroic, it usually means we're about to kill each other--or kill ourselves.

Orhan Pamuk
When another writer in another house is not free, no writer is free.

Orhan Pamuk
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.

Orhan Pamuk
The snow reminded me of the beauty and mystery of creation, of the essential joy that is life.

Orhan Pamuk
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 preciously what they cannot depict. That's why they substitute the joy of seeing for the joy of life.

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
I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well.

Orhan Pamuk
As soon as I observed myself from outside myself, I recognized and understood that I had a long-standing habit of keeping an eye on myself. That's how I managed to pull myself together, over the years, checking myself from the outside.

Orhan Pamuk
People only tell lies when there is something they are terribly frightened of losing.

Orhan Pamuk
What is the thing you want most from me? What can I do to make you love me?' Be yourself,' said Ipek.

Orhan Pamuk
Where there is true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity.

Orhan Pamuk
Are you an angel that approaching you should be so terrifying?

Orhan Pamuk
It may not happen in the first instant, but within ten minutes of meeting a man, a woman has a clear idea of who he is, or at least who he might be for her, and her heart of hearts has already told her whether or not she's going to fall in love with him.

Orhan Pamuk
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.

Orhan Pamuk
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.

Orhan Pamuk
Every person has a star, every star has a friend, and for every person carrying a star there is someone else who reflects it, and everyone carries this reflection like a secret confidante in the heart.

Orhan Pamuk
The biggest deception of the past thousand years is this: to confuse poverty with stupidity.

Orhan Pamuk
Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.

Orhan Pamuk
Nothing is as surprising as life. Except for writing. Except for writing. Yes, of course, except for writing, the only consolation.

Orhan Pamuk
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.

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
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
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 favourite promontories.

Orhan Pamuk
If we give what we treasure most to a Being we love with all our hearts, if we can do that without expecting anything in return, then the world becomes a beautiful place.

Orhan Pamuk
The thing that binds us together is that we have both lowered our expectations of life

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
Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow.

Orhan Pamuk