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"The hero of the book does long to experience God. But his conception of God is very western."
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"We are all the sum of a million moments in our lives."

"Reality spilled out into the alley like water from an overfilled bowl - as sound, as smell, as image, as plea, as response."

"I do have to travel a lot for speaking engagements."

"All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience."

"Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience."

"Is there anyone so wise as to learn by the experience of others?"

"All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it."

"Skill is the unified force of experience, intellect and passion in their operation."

"Observing and commenting, it is a piece of cake.Experiencing and sharing, that is a piece of work."

"I grew up like a neglected weed - ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it."
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'd been living luminously between two eternities of darknness."

"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."

"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, the image that comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or a literary tradition; it is the person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and, alone, turns inward. Amid his shadows, he builds a new world with words."

"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."

"Dogs do speak, but only to those who know how to listen."

"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."
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