The truly great books are always novels: 'Anna Karenina,' 'The Brothers Karamazov,' 'The Magic Mountain.' Just as with 'Shahnameh,' I browse these books from time to time to remember how a great book works on us or to teach my students at Columbia University.
— Orhan Pamuk
I think novelists should be disciplined and self-imposed working hours. I work a lot, but I don't feel that I'm working. I always feel that there is a child in me, healthy, and I'm playing.
I have always thought that the place where you sleep or the place you share with your partner should be separate from the place where you write. The domestic rituals and details somehow kill the imagination. They kill the demon in me.
I sometimes feel nervous because I give stupid answers to certain pointless questions. It happens in Turkish as much as in English. I speak bad Turkish and utter stupid sentences.
I wanted to tell a romantic and dark side of Ottoman history that was also slightly political, saying to the previous generation of writers, 'Look, I'm interested in Ottoman things, and I'm not afraid of it, and I'm doing something creative.'
At first my publisher had reservations about publishing it in the form you are familiar with.
These political movements flourish on the margins of Turkish society because of poverty and because of the people's feeling that they are not being represented.
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.
I really don't want to portray the Islamists as simply evil, the way it's often done in the west.
I believe in a world where there are no heroes, and I've read and know humanity a lot. There are moments that I admire in a person courage, intellect, hard work. These are the qualities I admire in an intellectual, in a writer, and there are so many people who have these things.
I don't judge my characters.
When I was publishing my first books, the previous generation of authors was fading away, so I was welcomed because I was a new author.
'Snow' is my most popular book in the United States. But in Turkey, it was not as popular as 'My Name is Red,' or even 'The Museum of Innocence,' because the secular leaders didn't want this bourgeois Orhan trying to understand these head-scarf girls.
One side of me is very busy paying attention to the details of life, the humanity of people, catching the street voices, the middle-class, upper-middle-class secret lives of Turks. The other side is interested in history and class and gender, trying to get all of society in a very realistic way.
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.
There's been quite a clear upswing in nationalist sentiments. Everyone is talking about it, in Turkey as well.
The hero of the book does long to experience God. But his conception of God is very western.
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.
When I write, I feel that I'm writing with my intellect. When I paint, I think it's some other force making me paint. I - as I wrote in my novel 'My Name is Red' - watch with amazement what my hand is doing on the paper, what kind of line, what kind of strange, beautiful thing it's doing in spite of my will, so to speak.
Generally, I get bad reviews in Turkey.
I have been attacked in Turkey more for my interviews than for my books. Political polemicists and columnists do not read novels there.
Good fiction is about asserting the beauties of the world, inventing a new, positive thing. Where am I going to get that? And it should be original; it should not be cliched. So the way I looked at history was not to accuse it of failure.
I want to describe the psychological state of the people in a certain city.
The opponents of this process have always tried to vilify westernization as a poor imitation.
I see Turkey's future as being in Europe, as one of many prosperous, tolerant, democratic countries.
My hero wants to belong too, but he doesn't want to give up all the things he came to value in the west.
