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"The writer's secret is not inspiration - for it is never clear where it comes from - it is his stubbornness, his patience."
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"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say."

"Never to rush something I was creating, but instead let it come into being as if it had a soul of it's own."

"A poet is someone who never forgets they were born naked."

"For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication."

"On the whole, stories don't write themselves."

"The first time I saw a mermaid in my dream, and she looked so real...THAT.'s fishy!!"

"You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page."

"Be an artist, in whatever little faculty possible.For the Earth, without 'Art' is just 'Eh"

"What doesn't kill me provides writing material."
Explore more quotes by Orhan Pamuk

"It's such a shame that we know so little about our own country, that we can't find it in our hearts to love our own kind. Instead we admire those who show our country disrespect and betray its people."

"At the end of the day there was nothing to be gained by reminding people that everything that had ever been written, even the greatest and most authoritative texts in the world, were about dreams, not real life, dreams conjured up by words."

"I must be myself, I said over and over. I must forget these people buzzing inside my head, I must forget their voices, their smells, their demands, their love, their hate, and be myself, I must be myself, I told myself, as i gazed down at the legs resting so happily on the stool, and I told myself again as I looked up to watch the smoke I'd blown up to the ceiling; I must be myself, because if I failed to be myself, I become the person they wanted me to be; if I had to be that insufferable person, I'd rather be nothing at all. It would be better if I didn't exist,..."

"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.'"

"To write is to transform that inward gaze into words, to study the worlds into which we pass when we retire into ourselves, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy."

"Every life is like a snowflake: individual existences might look identical from afar, but to understand one s own eternally mysterious uniqueness one had only to plot the mysteries of one s own snowflake."

"I realized that the longing for art, like the longing for love, is a malady that blinds us, and makes us forget the things we already know, obscuring reality."

"I asked him about his enemies. He began to count them. The list went on and on...." - Conversations with Yahya Kemal."
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