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.

Sometimes I would see them not as mementos of the blissful hours but as the tangible precious debris of the storm raging in my soul.

The writer’s secret is not inspiration – for it is never clear where it comes from – it is his stubbornness, his patience.

I always enjoy impersonating my characters in the first-person singular.

To appropriate an invention, be it artistic or technical, you have to have at least a part of your spirit embracing it so radically that you somehow change.

Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.

In fact no one recognizes the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it. It may well be that, in a moment of joy, one might sincerely believe that they are living that...

Ist nicht eigentliches Ziel von Roman und Museum, unsere Erinnerungen so aufrichtig wie möglich zu erzählen und dadurch unser Glück in das Glück anderer zu verwandeln?

Contrary to what is commonly believed, all murderers are men of extreme faith rather than unbelievers.

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.

For me, Westernization is not about consuming fanciful goods; it’s about a system of free speech, democracy, egalitarianism and respect for the people’s rights and dignity.

…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 ideals–only people living in rich countries can enjoy such luxuries.’ ‘Actually,...

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.

Despite the loss they were suffering, they’d both relaxed – as people do when they realize they’ve run out of chances for happiness

Eventually, we come to love certain novels because we have expended so much imaginative labor on them. This is why we hang on to those novels, whose pages are creased and dog-eared.

Idealism, unrealistic idealism, is always contrasted with the reality of the people, of the man in the street. The details of daily life are always more convincing than the political fantasies of the earlier generations.

If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my entire life, I am most surprised by those moments when I have felt as if the sentences, dreams, and pages that have...

Okul denen yerin aslında temel soruları cevaplamadığını, yalnızca onları hayatın gereği olarak benimsememize yardım ettiğini çıkarmıştım.

Sometimes Füsun yawned so beautifully that I would think that she had forgotten the entire world and that she was drawing from the depths of her soul a more peaceful life, as one might draw...

After all, isn’t the purpose of the novel, or of a museum, for that matter, to relate our memories with such sincerity as to transform individual happiness into a happiness all can share?

We fall in love more deeply when we’re unhappy.

I don’t judge my characters.

We should not judge Islam by terrorists. All civilizations and cultures produce terrorists. Every time there is a flag-burning, killing, or provocative films, I’m worried, not because something radical will happen, and this time, some...

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...

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...

Mutlu olabilmek için her gün bir miktar edebiyatla ilgilenmem gerekiyor.

Age had not made him less handsome, as is so often the case; it had simply made him less visible.

I want to describe the psychological state of the people in a certain city.

I don’t look at emails, Internet or newspapers before 1 P.M. I wake at 7 A.M., eat fruit, drink tea or coffee, and read what I’ve achieved, or not achieved, the previous day. Then I...

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.

Çünkü bana göre siyaset, en sonunda bizim gibi olmayanları kararlılıkla anlamama, romancılık ise anlama işidir.

…every life is like a snowflake: individual existences might look identical from afar, but to understand one´s own eternally mysterious uniqueness one had only to plot the mysteries of one´s own snowflake.

Life is short, and we should respect every moment of it.

People look at me as sort of a diplomat for Turkey, which by nature, I’m not; I don’t want to be. It’s again about that playfulness. Being Turkey’s voice or representative is not playful, it’s...

Just as good books give me the joys of being alive, bad novels depress me, and as I notice this sentiment coming from the pages, I stop. I also do not hesitate to walk out...

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

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...

Çünkü içinizde kalbinize nakşeylediğiniz bir sevgilinin yüzü yaşıyorsa eğer, dünya hala sizin evinizdir.

The truly great books are always novels: ‘Anna Karenina,’ ‘The Brothers Karamazov,’ ‘The Magic Mountain.’ Just as with ‘Shahnameh,’ I browse these books from time to time to remember how a great book works on...

I have been attacked in Turkey more for my interviews than for my books. Political polemicists and columnists do not read novels there.

When I write, I feel that I’m writing with my intellect. When I paint, I think it’s some other force making me paint. I – as I wrote in my novel ‘My Name is Red’...

Because, as I would always tell myself so many years later, lying here in my bed: You can’t start out again in life, that’s a carriage ride you only take once, but with a book...

I don’t want to be a tree; I want to be its meaning.

Every idiot assumes there’s a pressing circumstance about his love that necessitates particular haste, and thereby lays bare the intensity of his love, unwittingly putting a weapon into the hands of his beloved. If his...

A novelist is essentially a person who covers distance through his patience, slowly, like an ant. A novelist impresses us not by his demonic and romantic vision, but by his patience.

I really don’t want to portray the Islamists as simply evil, the way it’s often done in the west.

I get used to my fountain pens and my clothes, and I can never throw them away. I replace them only when I see that they are broken or embarrassing to wear.

But no one believes in that way what he reads in a novel…Oh yes they do. If only to see themselves as wise and superior and humanistic, they need to think of us as sweet...

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.

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...