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...

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...