Saturday, October 14, 2006

Orhan Pamuk Quotes, Nobel Literature Prize Author 2006

I haven't been given any prizes in Turkey since the age of 35. I started to get harsh and envious criticism and I now don't expect to get good reviews any more.
Orhan Pamuk Nobel Literature Prize Author 2006 about the criticism back home.

When an English writer writes about a love affair he writes about humanity's love affair, but when I write about a love affair I am only talking about a Turk's love affair.
upset over the discrimination between western writers and him

I grew up in Istanbul ... among society people. I wanted to be like the Europeans. I couldn't see how I could reconcile my becoming a European with a God who required women to wrap themselves in scarves.

Turkey is made in such a way that the country's culture is also made of two spirits not essentially fighting with each other but trying to find ways of combining. . . . In that sense, I'm slightly schizophrenic, slightly.

I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.
Opening line in The New Life

The sexy thing about this book is that I broke the taboo in Western civilization where there's an invented evil person called 'an Islamic fundamentalist.

I talk and talk too much.

I am a writer who believes in Tolstoy's dictum: If the character is too bad, make him good.

I was as surprised as anyone about my sales.
Orhan Pamuk on witnessing sales go up in Turkey

'Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in Turkey. Almost no one dares speak but me, and the nationalists hate me for that.
in a one-line interview to Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger

I'm not saying, look, here are bad guys, here are good guys. I'm not taking sides. In fact, it's more a crying out for happiness: Life is short, enjoy it, take your girl and run away..
Talking about his award winning book.

But sometimes I think - am I losing my naiveness? Is the child in me - who wants to write novels - dying as I get more and more involved in politics? I don't think so - I will get out of this with dignity, soon

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2006 is awarded to the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk:

"who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures".

Pamuk wanted to become a painter, and when he was sixteen set himself the task of copying Persian miniatures. He once said that he wanted to paint Istanbul just as Pissarro and Utrillo would have done. He now paints through words, working assiduously, seven days a week. He writes slowly, with a pen, not a computer, and has never done another job, except be a writer.
Georgia Brown

These are the words of a fifty-year-old writer who is trying to shape the chaotic thoughts of a long-ago adolescent.
Orhan Pamuk on his writing

A sword won't cut without inspiration from the pen.
Turkish Saying

1 comment:

  1. Huzzun of Turkey....
    Black Rose and her poses....
    House at Cihangir...
    Life in Pamuk Apartments...
    Cobblestoned pavements...
    Nobody can forget all these once you read Istanbul...
    Huzzun haunts too much...

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