1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk Quotes

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, his work has sold over thirteen million books in sixty-three languages, making him the country's best-selling writer.Pamuk is the author of novels including Silent House, The White Castle, The Black Book, The New Life, My Name Is Red, Snow, The Museum of Innocence, A Strangeness in My Mind, and The Red-Haired Woman. He is the Robert Yik-Fong Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where he teaches writing and comparative literature. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2018.Of partial Circassian descent and born in Istanbul, Pamuk is the first Turkish Nobel laureate. He is also the recipient of numerous other literary awards. My Name Is Red won the 2002 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, 2002 Premio Grinzane Cavour and 2003 International Dublin Literary Award.

The European Writers' Parliament came about as a result of a joint proposal by Pamuk and José Saramago. In 2005, the ultra-nationalist lawyer Kemal Kerinçsiz sued Pamuk over his statement regarding the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire. His intention, according to Pamuk himself, had been to highlight issues relating to freedom of speech in the country of his birth. The court initially declined to hear the case, but in 2011 Pamuk was ordered to pay 6,000 liras in total compensation for having insulted the plaintiffs' honor. Wikipedia  

✵ 7. June 1952
Orhan Pamuk photo

Works

The Museum of Innocence
Snow
Snow
Orhan Pamuk
Orhan Pamuk: 55 quotes63 likes

Famous Orhan Pamuk Quotes

“I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.”

Orhan Pamuk book The New Life

Source: The New Life

“Tell me then, does love make one a fool or do only fools fall in love?”

Orhan Pamuk

Source: My Name is Red

“Heaven was the place where you kept alive the dreams of your memories.”

Orhan Pamuk book Snow

Source: Snow

“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?”

Orhan Pamuk book Snow

Source: Snow

“Happiness means being close to the one you love, that's all. (Taking immediate possession is not necessary.)”

Orhan Pamuk book The Museum of Innocence

Source: The Museum of Innocence

“Let everyone know, I lived a very happy life.”

Orhan Pamuk book The Museum of Innocence

Source: The Museum of Innocence

Orhan Pamuk Quotes about love

“Suddenly Ka realized he was in love with İpek. And realizing that this love would determine the rest of his life, he was filled with dread.”

Orhan Pamuk book Snow

Source: Snow

“What is the thing you want most from me? What can I do to make you love me?'

Be yourself,' said Ipek.”

Orhan Pamuk book Snow

Source: Snow

“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 book The Museum of Innocence

Source: The Museum of Innocence

“When we lose people we love, we should never disturb their souls, whether living or dead. Instead. we should find consolation in an object that reminds you of them, something… I don't know… even an earring”

Orhan Pamuk book The Museum of Innocence

Source: The Museum of Innocence

“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 book The Museum of Innocence

Source: The Museum of Innocence

Orhan Pamuk Quotes about life

“My unhappiness protects me from life.”

Orhan Pamuk

“Life can't be all that bad,' i'd think from time to time. 'Whatever happens, i can always take a long walk along the Bosphorus.”

Orhan Pamuk book Istanbul: Memories and the City

Source: Istanbul: Memories and the City

“[N]othing is as surprising as life. Except for writing. Except for writing. Yes, of course, except for writing, the only consolation.”

Orhan Pamuk book The Black Book

Source: The Black Book

“Life is beautiful if you are on the road to somewhere”

Orhan Pamuk book The New Life

Source: The New Life

“She looked out the window; in her eyes was the light that you see only in children arriving at a new place, or in young people still open to new influences, still curious about the world because they have not yet been scarred by life.”

Orhan Pamuk book The Museum of Innocence

Source: The Museum of Innocence

“Whatever anybody says, the most important thing in life is to be happy.”

Orhan Pamuk book The Museum of Innocence

Source: The Museum of Innocence

Orhan Pamuk: Trending quotes

“In a city, you can be alone in a crowd, and in fact what makes the city a city is that it lets you hide the strangeness in your mind inside its teeming multitudes.”

Orhan Pamuk book A Strangeness in My Mind

Source: A Strangeness in My Mind

“… love is deep attention, deep compassion…”

Orhan Pamuk book The Museum of Innocence

The Museum of Innocence

“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.”

Orhan Pamuk

" My Father's Suitcase", Nobel Prize for Literature lecture http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2006/pamuk-lecture_en.html (December 7, 2006).

Orhan Pamuk Quotes

“I don't want to be a tree; I want to be its meaning.”

Orhan Pamuk

Source: My Name is Red

“Dogs do speak, but only to those who know how to listen.”

Orhan Pamuk

Source: My Name is Red

“The first thing I learned at school was that some people are idiots; the second thing I learned was that some are even worse.”

Orhan Pamuk book Istanbul: Memories and the City

Source: Istanbul: Memories and the City

“Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.”

Orhan Pamuk

Source: My Name is Red

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

Orhan Pamuk

Source: My Name is Red

“After all, a woman who doesn't love cats is never going to be make a man happy.”

Orhan Pamuk book The Museum of Innocence

Source: The Museum of Innocence

“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?”

Orhan Pamuk book The Museum of Innocence

Source: The Museum of Innocence

“People only tell lies when there is something they are terribly frightened of losing.”

Orhan Pamuk book The Museum of Innocence

Source: The Museum of Innocence

“The beauty and mystery of this world only emerges through affection, attention, interest and compassion… open your eyes wide and actually see this world by attending to its colors, details and irony.”

Orhan Pamuk

Source: My Name is Red

“In a brutal country like ours, where human life is 'cheap', it's stupid to destroy yourself for the sake of your beliefs. Beliefs? High ideas? Only people in rich countries can enjoy such luxuries.”

Orhan Pamuk book Snow

Source: Snow

“For if a lover's face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home.”

Orhan Pamuk

Source: My Name is Red

“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.”

Orhan Pamuk

Source: My Name is Red

“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.”

Orhan Pamuk

Source: My Name is Red

“There's a lot of pride involved in my refusal to believe in god.”

Orhan Pamuk book Snow

Source: Snow

“As always after drinking too much, I felt like my own ghost trying to take it's first solo walk outside the body.”

Orhan Pamuk book The Museum of Innocence

Source: The Museum of Innocence

“We're not stupid! We're just poor! And we have a right to insist on this distinction”

Orhan Pamuk book Snow

Source: Snow

“It's such a shame that we know so little about our own country, that we can't find it in our hearts to love our own kind. Instead we admire those who show our country disrespect and betray its people.”

Orhan Pamuk book Snow

Source: Snow

“The gap between compassion and surrender is love’s darkest, deepest region.”

Orhan Pamuk book The Museum of Innocence

Source: The Museum of Innocence

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

Orhan Pamuk

Source: My Name is Red

“The real question is how much suffering we've caused our womenfolk by turning headscarves into symbols - and using women as pawns in a political game.”

Orhan Pamuk book Snow

Source: Snow

“… 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 book Snow

Source: Snow

“Clocks and calendars do not exist to remind us of the Time we've forgotten but to regulate our relations with others and indeed all of society, and this is how we use them.”

Orhan Pamuk book The Museum of Innocence

Source: The Museum of Innocence

“Ka knew very well that life was a meaningless string of random incidents”

Orhan Pamuk book Snow

Source: Snow

“Colour is the touch of the eye,
Music to the deaf,
A word out of darkness.”

Orhan Pamuk

Source: My Name is Red

“does not just paralyze the inhabitants of Instanbul, it also gives them poetic license to be paralyzed.”

Orhan Pamuk book Istanbul: Memories and the City

Source: Istanbul: Memories and the City

“I need the pain of loneliness to make my imagination work.”

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 book The Museum of Innocence

Source: The Museum of Innocence

“Painting taught literature to describe.”

Orhan Pamuk

“… the endless repetition of an ordinary miracle.”

Orhan Pamuk book Snow

Source: Snow

“We live but for a short time, we see but very little, and we know almost nothing; so, at least, let's do some dreaming. Have yourself a very good Sunday, my dear readers.”

Orhan Pamuk book The Black Book

Source: The Black Book

Similar authors

José Saramago photo
José Saramago138
Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in … None
William Golding photo
William Golding79
British novelist, poet, playwright and Nobel Prize for Lite… None
Octavio Paz photo
Octavio Paz71
Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Lite… None
Knut Hamsun photo
Knut Hamsun22
Norwegian novelist and Nobel Prize recipient None
Yasunari Kawabata photo
Yasunari Kawabata44
Japanese author, Nobel Prize winner None
Luigi Pirandello photo
Luigi Pirandello7
Italian dramatist, novelist, short story writer, and poet, … None
Joseph Brodsky photo
Joseph Brodsky17
Russian and American poet and Nobel Prize for Literature la… None
Thomas Mann photo
Thomas Mann159
German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate None
Abdus Salam photo
Abdus Salam3
theoretical physicist, and Nobel Prize in Physics recipient None
Alice Munro photo
Alice Munro38
Canadian novelist None