Authoritarianism, an unrealistic occidental imagination - these issues will never be settled. Turkey will continue to take Europe as a model; it will continue to pursue its search for democracy.

— Orhan Pamuk

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is. When I speak of writing, the image that comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or a literary tradition; it is the person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and, alone, turns inward. Amid his shadows, he builds a new world with words.

— Orhan Pamuk

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 back to the beginning; if you like, you can read it through again, in order to figure out what you couldn't understand before, in order to understand life, isn't that so, Fatwa?

— Orhan Pamuk

Believing that Libel was saying these things to me to make me angry, I got angry. But this is not to say that the fury owed nothing to my partial awareness that she was right.

— Orhan Pamuk

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

— Orhan Pamuk

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 society, and this is how we use them.

— Orhan Pamuk

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

— Orhan Pamuk

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 why we are here on earth and what will happen to us in the next world.

— Orhan Pamuk

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

— Orhan Pamuk

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

— Orhan Pamuk