Top 250 Orhan Pamuk Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “The city’s more beautiful at night, you know: the people of the night always tell the truth.”

— Orhan Pamuk

102. “What is it to be a color? Color is the touch of the eye, music to the deaf, a word out of the darkness.”

— Orhan Pamuk

103. “Many great authors of the 19th century wrote under conditions of strict censorship. The great thing about the art of writing a novel, is that you can write about anything. All you have to say is that it’s fiction.”

— Orhan Pamuk

104. “My hero wants to belong too, but he doesn’t want to give up all the things he came to value in the west.”

— Orhan Pamuk

105. “Football can teach us that although a team’s individual players may be weak, it can still be successful if it uses common sense. Or that we should not attack anyone physically when we suffer a depressing defeat.”

— Orhan Pamuk

106. “My diary has its own kind of magic. It gives me the feeling of having accomplished something. On days when I don’t have time for this, I feel tortured.”

— Orhan Pamuk

107. “I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well. Though I drew my last breath long ago and my heart has stopped beating, no one, apart from that vile murderer, knows what’s happened to me.”

— Orhan Pamuk

108. “We’re not stupid! We’re just poor! And we have a right to insist on this distinction.”

— Orhan Pamuk

109. “There’s a lot of pride involved in my refusal to believe in god.”

— Orhan Pamuk

110. “I think it’s horrible that we Turks are always seen under the aspect of Islam first. I am constantly asked about religion, and almost always with a negative undercurrent that makes me furious.”

— Orhan Pamuk

111. “In actuality, we don’t look for smiles in pictures of bliss, but rather, for the happiness in life itself. Painters know this, but this is preciously what they cannot depict. That’s why they substitute the joy of seeing for the joy of life.”

— Orhan Pamuk

112. “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 of society, and this is how we use them.”

— Orhan Pamuk

113. “I believe strongly in an author’s moral responsibility. But his first obligation is to write good books.”

— Orhan Pamuk

114. “When another writer in another house is not free, no writer is free.”

— Orhan Pamuk

115. “Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among themselves, transforming my head into an orchestra pit where different musical instruments sounded out, and I would realize that I could endure this life because of these musicales going on in my head.”

— Orhan Pamuk

116. “To give charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and wonders of the world before us.”

— Orhan Pamuk

117. “The truth is contentment. Love and marriage are but a means to obtaining it.”

— Orhan Pamuk

118. “Hayati ciddiye almayi, gencligimde romanlari ciddiye alarak ogrendim. Edebi romanlar bize hayati ciddiye almayi, her seyin elimizde oldugunu, kisisel kararlarimizin hayatimizi sekillendirdigini gostererek ogretir.”

— Orhan Pamuk

119. “Enjoyment of football is part of the social context, and I have lost my faith in this social context.”

— Orhan Pamuk

120. “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 Wildes books in a bookshop makes me smile.”

— Orhan Pamuk

121. “Although everyone knew it as freedom from the laws of Islam, no one was quite sure what else westernization was good for.”

— Orhan Pamuk

122. “Many men believe that no life is determined in advance, that all stories are essentially a chain of coincidences. And yet, even those who believe this come to the conclusion, when they look back, that events they once took for chance were really inevitable.”

— Orhan Pamuk

123. “The entire world was like a palace with countless rooms whose doors opened into one another. We were able to pass from one room to the next only by exercising our memories and imaginations, but most of us, in our laziness, rarely exercised these capacities, and forever remained in the same room.”

— Orhan Pamuk

124. “At times like this what matters is not our words but our demeanor, not the magnitude or elegance of our grief but the degree to which we can express fellowship with those around us. I sometimes think that our love of cigarettes owes nothing to the nicotine, and everything to their ability to fill the meaningless void and offer an easy way of feeling as if we are doing something purposeful.”

— Orhan Pamuk

125. “The essential reason for my loneliness is that I don’t even know where I belong.”

— Orhan Pamuk

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

— Orhan Pamuk

127. “The ideal story should begin innocently like a fairy-tale, be frightening like a nightmare in the middle, and conclude sadly like a love story ending in separation.”

— Orhan Pamuk

128. “The drinking of coffee is an absolute sin! Our Glorious Prophet did not partake of coffee because he knew it dulled the intellect, caused ulcers, hernia and sterility; he understood that coffee was nothing but the Devil’s ruse.”

— Orhan Pamuk

129. “Ka knew very well that life was a meaningless string of random incidents.”

— Orhan Pamuk

130. “The difference lies in the fact that in Istanbul the remains of a glorious past civilization are everywhere visible. No matter how ill-kept, no matter how neglected or hemmed in they are by concrete monstrosities, the great mosques and other monuments of the city, as well as the lesser detritus of empire in every side street and corner – the little arches, fountains, and neighborhood mosques – inflict heartache on all who live among them. These.”

— Orhan Pamuk

131. “Mevlut arkadasinin bu sozunu de inandirici bulmadi ve o gunku sohbetleri boyunca birbirlerine yalnizca resmi goruslerini soylediklerini kederle dusundu. Oysa yirmi alti yil once Kismet satarken arkadasliklarini baslatan sey, sahsi goruslerini birbirlerine soyleyebileceklerine duyduklari iyimser inancti.”

— Orhan Pamuk

132. “Now he knew what it was that he wanted to tell Istanbul and write on its walls. It was both his public and his private view; it was what his heart intended as much as what his words had always meant to say. He said it to himself: “I have loved Rayiha more than anything in this world.”

— Orhan Pamuk

133. “Actually, it’s the other way round. In a poor country, the only consolation people can have is the one that comes from their beliefs.”

— Orhan Pamuk

134. “I have hired a bodyguard, on the recommendation of my friends and the government. It’s outrageous, having to live like this.”

— Orhan Pamuk

135. “I don’t read newspapers in the morning. I take a look at the dailies in the afternoon, but only when I’ve finished my work for the day. Reading about what is happening in Turkey once again would only be demoralizing for me.”

— Orhan Pamuk

136. “I think perhaps it is a generational thing. I talk to younger people and they say, Where is this melancholy city you talk about My Istanbul is a sunny place.”

— Orhan Pamuk

137. “Whenever I find myself talking of the beauty and the poetry of the Bosphorus and Istanbul’s dark streets, a voice inside me warns against exaggeration, a tendency perhaps motivated by a wish not to acknowledge the lack of beauty in my own life. If I see my city as beautiful and bewitching, then my life must be so too. A.”

— Orhan Pamuk

138. “Perhaps one day someone from a distant land will listen to this story of mine. Isn’t this what lies behind the desire to be inscribed in the pages of a book? Isn’t it just for the sake of this delight that sultans and viziers proffer bags of gold to have their histories written?”

— Orhan Pamuk

139. “According to my father, the greatest happiness in life was to marry the girl you’d spent your youth reading books with in the passionate pursuit of a shared ideal.”

— Orhan Pamuk

140. “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.”

— Orhan Pamuk

141. “If I see my city as beautiful and bewitching, then my life must be so too.”

— Orhan Pamuk

142. “I do not believe in a personal connection to God; that’s where it gets transcendental.”

— Orhan Pamuk

143. “What was venerated as style was nothing more than an imperfection or flaw that revealed the guilty hand.”

— Orhan Pamuk

144. “I work seven days a week, from 9 in the morning till 8 at night. I have the titles of the next eight novels I want to write. I feel myself pitiable, degraded on a day that I don’t write.”

— Orhan Pamuk

145. “At that moment, I wished my whole consciousness could be erased. I wanted to escape from my own awareness, to wander freely in a world outside my mind, but understanding now that I would always be two people, I realized that I’d never be able to let go.”

— Orhan Pamuk

146. “It may not happen in the first instant, but within ten minutes of meeting a man, a woman has a clear idea of who he is, or at least who he might be for her, and her heart of hearts has already told her whether or not she’s going to fall in love with him.”

— Orhan Pamuk

147. “But just like believing in God, falling in love is such a sacred feeling that it leaves you with no room for any other passions.”

— Orhan Pamuk

148. “As I was looking at myself in the bathroom mirror, it occurred to me that if all else failed, a man could at least kiss himself, and I stared in to the mirror, conjuring up the memory of the couple in the film. I couldn’t get the image of their lips out of my mind. But by now I’d realised I’d not even be kissing myself; I’d be kissing the mirror.”

— Orhan Pamuk

149. “What we essentially want is to draw something unknown to us in all its shadowiness, not something we know in all its illumination.”

— Orhan Pamuk

150. “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?”

— Orhan Pamuk