Top 250 Orhan Pamuk Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Orhan Pamuk

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

— Orhan Pamuk

154. “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

155. “In fact, my entire childhood consisted of looking at photographs in which the viewer sees the ball behind the line, looking through the goal net, and the poor goalkeeper in front of the net.”

— Orhan Pamuk

156. “Morality is probably the last thing one can learn from football.”

— Orhan Pamuk

157. “Age had not made him less handsome, as is so often the case; it had simply made him less visible.”

— Orhan Pamuk

158. “Not a day passes when the eagle of dark depression doesn’t take flight in my soul, said Sunay, infusing his words with mysterious pride. But I cannot catch myself. So hold yourself in. All’s well that ends well.”

— Orhan Pamuk

159. “I really don’t want to portray the Islamists as simply evil, the way it’s often done in the west.”

— Orhan Pamuk

160. “Painting and happiness. I would like my dear readers who have given close attention to my story and my fate to bear these two things in mind, as they are the genesis of my world.”

— Orhan Pamuk

161. “Writers like Pierre Loti, by contrast, make no secret of loving Istanbul and the Turkish people for the opposite reason: for the preservation of their eastern particularity and their resistance to becoming western.”

— Orhan Pamuk

162. “I want to describe the psychological state of the people in a certain city.”

— Orhan Pamuk

163. “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

164. “My childhood proved to me that there could be no enjoyment of football without community. But it becomes difficult when this community is having problems with its identity. That’s when we experience all possible forms of nationalist exaggeration.”

— Orhan Pamuk

165. “A person should love the life he has chosen enough to call it his own in the end.”

— Orhan Pamuk

166. “I’ve never left Istanbul, never left the houses, streets, and neighborhoods of my childhood.”

— Orhan Pamuk

167. “She felt herself age suddenly, but also knew what she now desired: to reconcile and grow old in peace, and have the wit to want nothing from the world.”

— Orhan Pamuk

168. “Well, on the one hand the Turks have the legitimate need to defend their national dignity – and this includes being recognized as a part of the west and Europe.”

— Orhan Pamuk

169. “A great painter does not content himself by affecting us with his masterpieces; ultimately, he succeeds in changing the landscape of our minds.”

— Orhan Pamuk

170. “I certainly see myself more as a craftsman than as an artist.”

— Orhan Pamuk

171. “The secularists in Turkey haven’t underestimated religion, they just made the mistake of believing they could control it with the power of the army alone.”

— Orhan Pamuk

172. “Let me first state forthright that contrary to what we’ve often read in books and heard from preachers, when you are a woman, you don’t feel like the Devil.”

— Orhan Pamuk

173. “We embraced. This so pleased me that I felt no guilt. I let myself be borne away by sweet emotion. I hugged him tighter. I let him kiss me, and I kissed him back. And as we kissed, it was as if the entire world had entered a gentle twilight. I wished everybody could embrace each other the way we did. I faintly recalled that love was supposed to be like this.”

— Orhan Pamuk

174. “I identify with my culture, but I am happy to be living on a tolerant, intellectual island where I can deal with Dostoyevsky and Sartre, both great influences for me.”

— Orhan Pamuk

175. “An illustration that does not complement a story, in the end, will become but a false idol. Since we cannot possibly believe in an absent story, we will naturally begin believing in the picture itself.”

— Orhan Pamuk

176. “Even if you’re not happy” – here, she indicated my brother with her eyes – “even when you’re having your worst day you live your life as if you are. All sorrows fade away when you’re surrounded by your family.”

— Orhan Pamuk

177. “This was a far cry from the meritocratic Ottoman period, when only by dint of an education could a man of humble background hope to rise through the ranks, get rich, and become a pasha.”

— Orhan Pamuk

178. “I was trying to think of something to say that would sound more meaningful, but when you get down to it, words aren’t very useful at baring our souls, they’re just something else to hide behind.”

— Orhan Pamuk

179. “For the traveler we see leaning on his neighbor is an honest and well-meaning man and full of melancholy, like those Chekhov characters so laden with virtues that they never know success in life.”

— Orhan Pamuk

180. “The challenge is to lend conviction even to the voices which advocate views I find personally abhorrent, whether they are political Islamists or officers justifying a coup.”

— Orhan Pamuk

181. “Whenever I think of these writers together, I am reminded that what gives a city its special character is not just its topography or its buildings but rather the sum total of every chance encounter, every memory, letter, color, and image jostling in its inhabitants’ crowded memories after they have been living, like me, on the same streets for fifty years.”

— Orhan Pamuk

182. “As Ka would later write, it may have been now, as they were holding each other and weeping, that Ipek discovered something for the first time: To live in indecision, to waver between defeat and a new life, offered as much pleasure as pain.”

— Orhan Pamuk

183. “My fear, which I shared with everyone in the Turkish secular bourgeoisie, was not of God but of the fury of those who believed in Her too much.”

— Orhan Pamuk

184. “When there is not a breath of wind, the waters sometimes shudder as if from inside and take on the finish of washed silk.”

— Orhan Pamuk

185. “If we love someone very much, we know that even if we give him the most valuable thing we have, we know not to expect harm from him. This is what a sacrifice is.”

— Orhan Pamuk

186. “Like most Turkish men of my world who entered into this predicament, I never paused to wonder what might be going on in the mind of the woman with whom I was madly in love, and what her dreams might be; I only fantasized about her.”

— Orhan Pamuk

187. “God takes note of His creatures’ true intentions. The Lord favors a man who intends to fast during Ramadan over a man who fasts because he can’t find food to eat anyway. Because one of them means it, while the other one doesn’t.”

— Orhan Pamuk

188. “Don’t worry – love that blooms this fast is just as fast to wither.”

— Orhan Pamuk

189. “I told him just so he wouldn’t be fooled by the bright lights of Istanbul into thinking that life was somehow easy.”

— Orhan Pamuk

190. “Estoy sufriendo las penas del infierno sin ni siquiera haber muerto.”

— Orhan Pamuk

191. “God loves some people more. Those people end up rich. He loves some people a little less, and those people stay poor. You take a pin and scratch off one of these colored circles, and underneath you’ll find your gift and your fortune.”

— Orhan Pamuk

192. “The only antidote to the loneliness of the streets was the streets themselves.”

— Orhan Pamuk

193. “To avoid disappointment in art, one mustn’t treat it as a career.”

— Orhan Pamuk

194. “Sewaktu muda, Ka sangat meyakini bahwa tidak ada yang lebih terhormat selain mati akibat alasan politik intelektual, atau untuk membela apa yang telah ditulisnya.”

— Orhan Pamuk

195. “If they spoke, it was in whispers.”

— Orhan Pamuk

196. “Only imbeciles are innocent.”

— Orhan Pamuk

197. “After becoming engaged to my grandfather, and before marrying him, she did something rather brave in Istanbul in 1917 – she went out with him to a restaurant.”

— Orhan Pamuk

198. “It’s not enough to be oppressed, you must also be in the right. Most oppressed people are in the wrong to an almost ridiculous degree. What shall I believe in?”

— Orhan Pamuk

199. “Nothing makes you happy in life except love... Neither the books you write or cites you see... I am very lonely... If I say that I want to be here in this city close to you until the end of my life would you believe me?”

— Orhan Pamuk

200. “In a smoky corner of my mind I was reminded of a truth drawn from bitter experience: immersing oneself in the problems of a book is a good way to keep from thinking of love.”

— Orhan Pamuk