Orhan Pamuk

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.

A letter doesn’t communicate by words alone. A letter, just like a book, can be read by smelling it, touching it and fondling it. Thereby, intelligent folk will say, “Go on then, read what the letter tells you!” whereas the dullwitted will say, “Go on then, read what he’s written!”

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

The beauty and mystery of this world only emerges through affection, attention, interest and compassion; if you want to live in that paradise where happy mares and stallions live, open your eyes wide and actually see this world by attending to its colors, details and irony.

Before my birth there was infinite time, and after my death, inexhaustible time. I never thought of it before: I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darkness.

T feel like the Devil not because I’ve murdered two men, but because my portrait has been made in this fashion.

Yet does illustrating in a new way signify a new way of seeing?

Suddenly, it seemed to me that 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.

Try to discover who I am from my choice of words and colors, as attentive people like yourselves might examine footprints to catch a thief.

Where there is true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity.

Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.

There are moments in all our lives when we realize, even as we experience them, that we are living through events we will never forget, even long afterward.