Orhan Pamuk citations

Page 2

“Toutes ces choses que j'avais apprises, auxquelles j'avais cru jusque-là, n'étaient plus que des détails dépourvus de tout intérêt, et des choses que j'ignorais surgirent des recoins où elles s'étaient terrées jusque-là et me lancèrent des signaux.”

“Le meilleur commencement pour une bonne amitié, c'est un secret.”

“J'écris parce que je ne peux supporter la réalité qu'en la modifiant.”

“Pour moi, être écrivain, c'est découvrir patiemment, au fil des années, la seconde personne, cachée, qui vit en nous, et un monde qui sécrète notre seconde vie : l'écriture m'évoque en premier lieu, non pas les romans, la poésie, la tradition littéraire, mais l'homme qui, enfermé dans une chambre, se replie sur lui-même, seul avec les mots, et jette, ce faisant, les fondations d'un nouveau monde.”

“Les mots pour nous, écrivains, sont les pierres dont nous nous bâtissons.”

“Pour moi le secret du métier d'écrivain réside non pas dans une inspiration d'origine inconnue mais dans l'obstination et la patience.”

“(…)le problème du vrai poète est toujours le même. S'il est heureux pendant une longue période, il devient ordinaire. S'il est malheureux pendant une longue période, il ne peut plus trouver en lui la force de tenir en vie sa poésie… La vraie poésie ne cohabite avece le bonheur que pour une durée très courte. Au bout d'un certain temps, soit le bonheur banalise la poésie et le poète, soit alors la vraie poésie gâche le bonheur.”

“J'écris non pas pour raconter des histoires, mais pour construire des histoires.”

“(…)la plus grande des erreurs de l'être humain, (…), la plus grosse tromperie vieille de milliers d'années réside en ceci : on a confondu être pauvre et être idiot.”

“J'écris parce que je n'arrive pas à être heureux, quoi que je fasse. J'écris pour être heureux.”

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

“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.”

“The thing that binds us together is that we have both lowered our expectations of life”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“… 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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“Painting taught literature to describe.”

“… the endless repetition of an ordinary miracle.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Immersing oneself in the problems of a book is a good way to keep from thinking of love.”

“… love is deep attention, deep compassion…”

“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.”