With 'The Forty Rules of Love,' I wanted to write a love story. But I wanted a love story with a spiritual dimension. For me, that took me to Rumi. And from Rumi, I went to Shams of Tabriz. That's how the story took shape.
— Elif Safak
If you are a writer from Turkey, Pakistan, Nigeria, Egypt, you don't have the luxury of being apolitical. You can't say, 'That's politics. I'm just doing my work.'
Art and literature should help us to get out of our mental cocoons.
I realized over the years if I'm writing about humor, irony, satire, I much prefer to do that in English. And if there is sorrow, melancholy, longing, I much prefer to do that in Turkish. Each language has its own strength to me, and I feel connected and attached to both Turkish and English. I dream in more than one language.
English, for me, is an acquired language. I started with English at the age of 10. At the time, it was my third language.
Politicians and leaders who see the media as 'the enemy within' divide society into two clashing cultural camps. Populist demagogues benefit from binary oppositions.
I was in Madrid as a young girl and a teenager. I'll never forget when I went to the Prado Museum for the first time and saw the paintings of Goya. They had such a big impact on me.
Bad writing is like a bad relationship. Don't be addicted to it just because you are familiar with its ways. Let go.
Writing is a tribute to solitude. It is choosing introversion over extroversion, lonely hours/days/weeks/years over fun and sociability.
I write as if I were drunk. It is a process of intuition rather than placing myself above my story like a puppeteer pulling strings. For me, it's a scary, chaotic process over which I have little control. Words demand other words, characters resist me.
I find families intriguing, perhaps because I did not grow up in one. I was raised by a feminist, independent, single mother, a divorcee.
I like to question cultural biases wherever I go, and I question Islamophobia as much as I question anti-western sentiment because I think all extremist ideologies are very similar.
Part of me always felt like the other, the outsider, the observer. My father had two sons with his second wife, who I didn't meet until my late 20s. I was always on the periphery. In Madrid, I was the only Turk in a very international school, so I had to start thinking about identity. All these things affected me.
My readers are surprisingly mixed. I have conservative readers - for instance, women with headscarves - but also many liberal, leftist, feminist, nihilist, environmentalist, and secularist readers. Next to those are mystics, agnostics, Kurds, Turks, Alevis, Sunnis, gays, housewives, and businesswomen.
Writing in another language gives me an additional freedom, an additional way of thinking. It's a challenge, but I like the challenge.
The lack of trust in supranational entities and cosmopolitan elite creates a fertile ground for tribalist belongings and reactionary politics.
It is tiring to be Turkish. The country is badly polarised, bitterly politicized. Every writer, journalist, poet knows that because of an article, a novel, an interview, a poem or a tweet you can be sued, put on trial, even arrested. Self-censorship is widespread.
When I looked at people like Goya and Pina Bausch, the message I got was just do what you're passionate about. Don't think about what other people are going to say or how they're going to receive your work. Just be your work.
If there is no love between the author and the story, there is no love between the reader and the story.
For me, writing stories is one way of feeling connected to the universe and God.
I write with humour about sadness, to introduce an element of sweet to the sour, a bit like Turkish food.
I spent my entire childhood observing people. I still do.
For me, coming from the women's movement, politics is not just about parties and parliament. There is politics in our private space and in gender relations as well. Wherever there's power, there's politics.
Turkey is a complex country. Most readers are women, of all generations, and they are passionate about books. However, the written culture is mostly patriarchal. In general, men write; women read. I would like to see this pattern changing. More women should write novels, poems, plays, and hopefully, more men will read fiction.
I write my novels in English first; then they are translated into Turkish by professional translators. Then I take their translation and rewrite. So basically, I write the same novel twice.
When I was 10 years old, we moved to Spain with my mother. I learned Spanish before I learned English. But the English language stayed with me.
When societies go backwards and slide into authoritarianism, nationalism, and tribalism, machismo and sexism are also emboldened.
There are two different ways of writing a novel. The first I call the traditional father way, when the novelist slightly situates himself or herself above the text and knows what each and every character is going to do. It's a bit like engineering. I've never felt close to that tradition. I like the second way, which relies a bit more on intuition.
We need a dose of doubt and a dose of faith, to challenge each other.
The only way to learn writing is by writing. Talent, as charming as it sounds, amounts to no more than 12 per cent of the process. Work is 80 per cent. The remaining 8 per cent is 'luck' or 'zeitgeist' - in short, things that are not in our hands.
God is the biggest storyteller, and when we create stories, we connect with him and with each other across cultural, religious and gender boundaries.
Books change us. Books save us. I know this because it happened to me. Books saved me. So, I do believe through stories we can learn to change, we can learn to empathize and be more connected with the universe and with humanity.
I love commuting between languages just like I love commuting between cultures and cities.
