Top 250 Orhan Pamuk Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I was at the end of my tether when my first book was published. For eight years I didn’t make a penny, I worked so hard, didn’t drink, didn’t enjoy life.”

— Orhan Pamuk

52. “We fall in love more deeply when were unhappy.”

— Orhan Pamuk

53. “Mankind’s greatest error, the biggest deception of the past thousand years is this: to confuse poverty with stupidity.”

— Orhan Pamuk

54. “For if a lover’s face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home.”

— Orhan Pamuk

55. “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, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words.”

— Orhan Pamuk

56. “I consider myself a person who comes from a Muslim culture. In any case, I would not say that I’m an atheist. So I’m a Muslim who associates historical and cultural identification with this religion.”

— Orhan Pamuk

57. “Sometimes I would see them not as mementos of the blissful hours but as the tangible precious debris of the storm raging in my soul.”

— Orhan Pamuk

58. “Maybe you’ve understood by now that for men like myself, that is, melancholy men for whom love, agony, happiness and misery are just excuses for maintaining eternal loneliness, life offers neither great joy nor great sadness.”

— Orhan Pamuk

59. “The thing that binds us together is that we have both lowered our expectations of life.”

— Orhan Pamuk

60. “As soon as I observed myself from outside myself, I recognized and understood that I had a long-standing habit of keeping an eye on myself. That’s how I managed to pull myself together, over the years, checking myself from the outside.”

— Orhan Pamuk

61. “All great masters, in their work, seek that profound void within color and outside time.”

— Orhan Pamuk

62. “But after my death let it be known that in my old age, at the very end of my life, there was still plenty that made me smile.”

— Orhan Pamuk

63. “Now everyone is prouder and poorer.”

— Orhan Pamuk

64. “I see Turkey’s future as being in Europe, as one of many prosperous, tolerant, democratic countries.”

— Orhan Pamuk

65. “As always after drinking too much, I felt like my own ghost trying to take it’s first solo walk outside the body.”

— Orhan Pamuk

66. “Turks have a dismissive phrase: he works like a clerk. I have turned this insult around: I am proud to say that I work like a clerk.”

— Orhan Pamuk

67. “But I think it must be easier for a girl to marry someone she doesn’t know, because the more you get to know men, the harder it is to love them.”

— Orhan Pamuk

68. “If the soulmate is absent there is no need for the soul.”

— Orhan Pamuk

69. “A Good Education Removes the Barriers Between Rich and Poor.”

— Orhan Pamuk

70. “When something explosive is kept hidden away, a tension builds within that must ultimately be released.”

— Orhan Pamuk

71. “Are you an angel that approaching you should be so terrifying?”

— Orhan Pamuk

72. “It’s very gratifying to me to see my works bringing people closer to my country.”

— Orhan Pamuk

73. “It’s a great relief for me that no one will ask me anymore: “Orhan, when will you get the Nobel Prize?””

— Orhan Pamuk

74. “I’m not indignant,” I said indignantly.”

— Orhan Pamuk

75. “I believe that it isn’t victories but defeats that promote nationalism.”

— Orhan Pamuk

76. “Great changes in the direction of peace have often come from people who were no great advocates of peace to begin with.”

— Orhan Pamuk

77. “More than anything I am a novelist. But for me, an author’s job is not only to create linguistically accomplished works. As an author I also want to stimulate discussion.”

— Orhan Pamuk

78. “Yet does illustrating in a new way signify a new way of seeing?”

— Orhan Pamuk

79. “Thoughts ramble through my head like nervous burglars in a pitch-black house.”

— Orhan Pamuk

80. “My decision to view the world through novels, as it were, which is a typically European way of looking at things, became a heavy burden for me. But I took it on consciously, even though it was torture for me.”

— Orhan Pamuk

81. “I need a moment of time for myself every day, like a child playing with his things. When I travel, I routinely find a quiet place, open my diary and write something in it.”

— Orhan Pamuk

82. “To savour Istanbul’s back streets, to appreciate the vines and trees that endow its ruins with accidental grace, you must, first and foremost, be a stranger to them.”

— Orhan Pamuk

83. “To travel along the Bosphorus, be it in a ferry, a motor launch, or a rowboat, is to see the city house by house, neighborhood by neighborhood, and also from afar as a silhouette, an ever-mutating mirage.”

— Orhan Pamuk

84. “Let everyone know, I lived a very happy life.”

— Orhan Pamuk

85. “After all, nothing can be as astounding as life. Except for writing. Yes, of course, except for writing, the sole consolation.”

— Orhan Pamuk

86. “Snow reminds Ka of God! But I’m not sure it would be accurate. What brings me close to God is the silence of snow.”

— Orhan Pamuk

87. “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 in the meaning of the whole.”

— Orhan Pamuk

88. “The sea was as dark as dreams and as deep as sleep.”

— Orhan Pamuk

89. “Kenangan-kenangan ini tidak berhubungan satu sama lain, kecuali bahwa semuanya memiliki keterkaitan dengan cinta. Ka tahu betul bahwa kehidupan adalah rangkaian tanpa arti dari berbagai kejadian acak.”

— Orhan Pamuk

90. “My religion is complicated. Literature is my true religion. After all, I come from a completely non-religious family.”

— Orhan Pamuk

91. “I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well.”

— Orhan Pamuk

92. “Ka thought it strangely depressing that the suicide girls had had to struggle to find a private moment to kill themselves. Even after swallowing their pills, even as they lay quietly dying, they’d had to share their rooms with others.”

— Orhan Pamuk

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

— Orhan Pamuk

94. “In a city, you can be alone in a crowd, and in fact what makes the city a city is that it lets you hide the strangeness in your mind inside its teeming multitudes.”

— Orhan Pamuk

95. “Marriage douses love’s flame, leaving nothing but a barren and melancholy blackness. Of course, after marriage, love itself will vanish anyway; but happiness fills the void. Still, there are those hasty fools who fall in love before marrying and, burning with emotion, exhaust all their feeling, believing love to be the highest goal in life.” “What, then, is the truth of the matter?” “The truth is contentment. Love and marriage are but a means to obtaining it:.”

— Orhan Pamuk

96. “In the mornings I used to say goodbye to my wife like someone going to work. I’d leave the house, walk around a few blocks, and come back like a person arriving at the office.”

— Orhan Pamuk

97. “Nationalism stems from catastrophes, whether they are caused by earthquakes or lost wars.”

— Orhan Pamuk

98. “Turkish football serves the cause of nationalism, but not of the nation.”

— Orhan Pamuk

99. “The sight of snow made her think how beautiful and short life is and how, in spite of all their enmities, people have so very much in common; measured against eternity and the greatness of creation, the world in which they lived was narrow. That’s why snow drew people together. It was as if snow cast a veil over hatreds, greed, and wrath and made everyone feel close to one another.”

— Orhan Pamuk

100. “The city’s more beautiful at night, you know: the people of the night always tell the truth.”

— Orhan Pamuk