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...

Culture is mix. Culture means a mix of things from other sources. And my town, Istanbul, was this kind of mix. Istanbul, in fact, and my work, is a testimony to the fact that East...

‘Snow’ is my most popular book in the United States. But in Turkey, it was not as popular as ‘My Name is Red,’ or even ‘The Museum of Innocence,’ because the secular leaders didn’t want...

Let us say in the pocket of one of my old coats I find a movie ticket from many years ago. Once I see the ticket, not only do I remember that I saw this...

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

carried away” by herfeelings for me. A proper understanding of my story depends, I think, on a full appreciation of thepleasure we took from these sweet shared moments. I am certain that the fire at...

Let me first state forthright that contrary to what we’ve often read in books and heard from preachers, when you are a woman, you don’t feel like the Devil.

From a very young age, I suspected there was more to my world than I could see: somewhere in the streets of Istanbul, in a house resembling ours, there lived another Orhan so much like...

I think less than people think I do about politics. I care about writing.

When people read a novel 600 pages long, six months pass, and all they will remember are five pages. They don’t remember the text – instead, they remember the sensations the text gives them.

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

I do know this much though: If a man resorts to wiles, guile and petty deceptions, it means he’s nowhere near being in love.

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

A museum should not just be a place for fancy paintings but should be a place where we can communicate our lives through our everyday objects.

I have always thought that the place where you sleep or the place you share with your partner should be separate from the place where you write. The domestic rituals and details somehow kill the...

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...

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,...

…and awakening, at that moment, to the thrilling prospect of complete surrender, not just of one’s lips but of one’s entire body to a lover’s mercy, we recognized that the gap between compassion and surrender...

Oscar Wilde always makes me smile – with respect and admiration. His short stories prove that it is possible to be both sarcastic, even cynical, but deeply compassionate. Just seeing the cover of one of...

The fictive structure, my work, my imagination, my books are about the details, the huge construction about culture, Islamic culture or modern Turkey. They’re all intertwined.

Modernity means overabundance. We are living in the age of mass-produced objects, things that come without announcing themselves and end up on our tables, on our walls. We use them – most of us don’t...

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...

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...

Contrary to what the West seems to think, it is not poverty that brings people like us so close to God. It’s the fact that no one is more curious than we are to learn...

I believe in a world where there are no heroes, and I’ve read and know humanity a lot. There are moments that I admire in a person courage, intellect, hard work. These are the qualities...

I write a world where everyone is partly right.

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

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?

…at the end of the day there was nothing to be gained by reminding people that everything that had ever been written, even the greatest and most authoritative texts in the world, were about dreams,...

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

I don’t like to make strong statements. I want to write strong novels… I keep my deep, radical things for my novels.

I have the legacy of my father and his nocturnal automatic waking up. But I like those periods. I immediately have a different vision of humanity and my life.

As much as I live I shall not imitate them or hate myself for being different to them

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

…love is deep attention, deep compassion…

Good fiction is about asserting the beauties of the world, inventing a new, positive thing. Where am I going to get that? And it should be original; it should not be cliched. So the way...

When the whole world reads your books, is there any other happiness for a writer? I am happy that my books are read in 57 languages. But I am focused on Istanbul not because of...