Einstein...even failed physics once, but he'd never thought of giving up school to make a living.

— Orhan Pamuk

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.

— Orhan Pamuk

...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.

— Orhan Pamuk

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 clichéd. So the way I looked at history was not to accuse it of failure.

— Orhan Pamuk

Happiness is holding someone in your arms and knowing you hold the whole world.

— Orhan Pamuk

…he quit drinking coffee, and naturally, his brain stopped working.

— Orhan Pamuk

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.

— Orhan Pamuk

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 ourselves have known?

— Orhan Pamuk

How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another's heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known? Even if the world's rich and powerful were to put themselves in the shoes of the rest, how much would they really understand the wretched millions suffering around them? So it is when Organ the novelist peers into the dark corners of his poet friend's difficult and painful life: How much can he really see?

— Orhan Pamuk

I asked him about his enemies. He began to count them. The list went on and on...." - Conversations with Maya Kamal

— Orhan Pamuk