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

Most of the time it’s not the Europeans who belittle us. What happens when we look at them is that we belittle ourselves. When we undertake the pilgrimage, it’s not just to escape the tyranny at home but also to reach to the depths of our souls. The day arrives when the guilty must return...

It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn’t know it. Had I known, had I cherished this gift, would everything have turned out differently?

The greatest happiness is when the eye discovers beauty where neither then mind conceived of nor the hand intended any.

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

Dacă în tine dăinuie chipul unei iubite, pictat în inimă, îți este casă întreaga lume.

Only vulgar people boast about how happy they are

Das echte Liebesleid nistet sich an der Basis unserer Existenz ein, erwischt uns unerbittlich an unserem schwächsten Punkt, greift von da auf alles andere über und verteilt sich unaufhaltsam über unseren ganzen Körper und unser ganzes Leben. Wenn wir unglücklich verliebt sind, dienen unsere sämtlichen Leiden und Sorgen, vom Tod des Vaters bis hin zum...

Time had not faded my memories (as I had prayed to God it might), nor had it healed my wounds as it is said always to do. I began each day with the hope that the next day would be better, my recollections a little less pointed, but I would awake to the same pain,...

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.

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

We don’t need more museums that try to construct the historical narratives of a society, community, team, nation, state, tribe, company, or species. We all know that the ordinary, everyday stories of individuals are riches, more humane, and much more joyful.

The challenge is to lend conviction even to the voices which advocate views I find personally abhorrent, whether they are political Islamists or officers justifying a coup.

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

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

I write because I have an innate need to. I write because I can’t do normal work. 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...

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

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.

…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.

The knowledge that she could learn to love a man had always meant more to her than loving him effortlessly, more even than falling in love, and that was why she now felt that she was on the threshold of a new life, a happiness bound to endure for a very long time.

There are two kinds of Communists: the arrogant ones, who enter the fray hoping to make men out of the people and bring progress to the nation; and the innocent ones, who get involved because they believe in equality and justice. The arrogant ones are obsessed with power; they presume to think for everyone; only...

Yet does illustrating in a new way signify a new way of seeing?

I asked him about his enemies. He began to count them. The list went on and on….” – Conversations with Yahya Kemal

These were innocent people, so innocent that they thought poverty a crime that wealth would allow them to forget. — from the notebooks of Celal Salik

The essential reason for my loneliness is that I don’t even know where I belong.

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.

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

My mood, as I identify with each of my heroes, resembles what I used to feel when I played alone as a child. Like all children, I liked to play make-believe, to put myself in someone else’s place and imagine dream worlds in which I was a soldier, a famous soccer player, or a great...

At the heart of the novelist’s craft lies an optimism which thinks that the knowledge we gather from our everyday experience, if given proper form, can become valuable knowledge about reality.

Ka found it very soothing: for the first time in years, he felt part of a family. In spite of the trials and responsibilities of what was called ‘family’, he saw now the joys of its unyielding togetherness, and was sorry not to have known more of it in his life.

The hero of the book does long to experience God. But his conception of God is very western.

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 not childlike; it makes me self-conscious, kills the child in me.

I don’t much care whether rural Anatolians or Istanbul secularists take power. I’m not close to any of them. What I care about is respect for the individual.

When I was publishing my first books, the previous generation of authors was fading away, so I was welcomed because I was a new author.

Language is me, in a way. Really, I feel it.

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

Generally, I get bad reviews in Turkey.

Remembering the past always comes with an image or a view attached.

This is the greatest consolation in life. 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.

These political movements flourish on the margins of Turkish society because of poverty and because of the people’s feeling that they are not being represented.

Self-hatred is OK. I have self-hatred, too. It’s OK. What’s bad is if you don’t know how to get out of it, don’t know how to manage it. Self-hatred is, in fact, a good thing if you can clearly see the mechanism of it, because it helps you to understand others.

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 in your hand, no matter how confusing and perplexing it might be, once you’ve finished it, you can always go...

Y lo peor era que mi cara se había transformado en otra completamente distinta, en la comisura de mis labios se abría paso una cierta desvergüenza de tanto beber y besar en las fiestas, mis ojos parecían lánguidos de permanecer despierto sin tener en cuenta la hora o de caer inconsciente por la bebida, en...

Sabía que si regresaba a Venecia no podría retomar una vida que había dejado a medias en el mismo punto en que se había interrumpido. Como mucho, podría iniciar una vida distinta.

Fue a lo largo de aquellos cuatro años cuando aprendí que la vida no es una espera sino algo que se puede disfrutar.

Es algo sabido que la vida no está predeterminada y que todas las historias son una cadena de casualidades. Pero incluso los que son conscientes de esa realidad, cuando llega cierto momento de su existencia y miran atrás, llegan a la conclusión de que lo que vivieron como casualidades no fueron sino hechos inevitables.

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 of a movie house if the film is bad.

If a writer is to tell his own story – tell it slowly, and as if it were a story about other people – if he is to feel the power of the story rise up inside him, if he is to sit down at a table and patiently give himself over to this art...

I wrote ‘My Name is Red’ just to remember painting, where the hand does it before the intellect. When I’m captive to it, I’m a happier person. Kierkegaard tells us that a happy person is someone who lives in the present; the unhappy person, someone who lives either in the past or the future.

To know is to remember that you’ve seen.To see is to know without remembering. Thus painting is remembering the blackness.