I want to describe the psychological state of the people in a certain city.
Without patience and the skill of a craftsman, even the greatest talent is wasted.
When another writer in another house is not free, no writer is free.
All great masters, in their work, seek that profound void within color and outside time.
As soon as I observed myself from outside myself, I recognized and understood that I had a long-standing habit of keeping an eye on myself. That’s how I managed to pull myself together, over the years, checking myself from the outside.
It is not my intention to explain Turkey, its culture and its problems. My literature has a universal concern: I want to bring people and their emotions closer to my readers, not explain Turkish politics.
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 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.
It’s very gratifying to me to see my works bringing people closer to my country.
I really don’t want to portray the Islamists as simply evil, the way it’s often done in the west.
My hero wants to belong too, but he doesn’t want to give up all the things he came to value in the west.
Colour is the touch of the eye, Music to the deaf, A word out of darkness.
No one drives me into exile, not even the nationalists.
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.
East and West are coming together. Whether in peace or anarchy – they are coming together. There needn’t be a clash between East and West, between Islam and Europe.
I am a highly disciplined person. I get up at seven every morning and, still in my pajamas, sit down at my desk where my checkered ring binders and my fountain pen are ready for use. I try to write two pages every day.
A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words.
In a city, you can be alone in a crowd, and in fact what makes the city a city is that it lets you hide the strangeness in your mind inside its teeming multitudes.
The sight of snow made her think how beautiful and short life is and how, in spite of all their enmities, people have so very much in common; measured against eternity and the greatness of creation, the world in which they lived was narrow. That’s why snow drew people together. It was as if snow cast a veil over hatreds, greed, and wrath and made everyone feel close to one another.