Orhan Pamuk
Orhan Pamuk
Ferit Orhan Pamukis a Turkish novelist, screenwriter, academic and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. One of Turkey's most prominent novelists, his work has sold over thirteen million books in sixty-three languages, making him the country's best-selling writer...
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 June 1952
CityIstanbul, Turkey
capture love museum political politics wants
'The Museum of Innocence' is not about politics; it's a love story, but I think it's political in the sense that it wants to capture how a man suppresses a woman.
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The habit of collecting, of attachment to things, is an essential human trait. But Western civilization put collecting on a pedestal by inventing museums. Museums are about representing power. It could be the king's power or, later, people's power.
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Museums are western inventions where the rich and the powerful or the government and the state tend to exhibit the signs and symbol and images of their culture.
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'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.
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A museum should not just be a place for fancy paintings but should be a place where we can communicate our lives through our everyday objects.
heart museums losing
In poetically well built museums, formed from the heart's compulsions, we are consoled not by finding in them old objects that we love, but by losing all sense of Time.
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After all, isn't the purpose of the novel, or of a museum, for that matter, to relate our memories with such sincerity as to transform individual happiness into a happiness all can share?
real space museums
Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.
armenians clear loud million stand
I repeat, I said loud and clear that 1 million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in Turkey, and I stand by that.
perhaps
I think perhaps it is a generational thing,
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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.
attention busy catching class details history humanity interested life lives paying realistic secret side society street trying
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.
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I have the legacy of my father and his nocturnal automatic waking up. But I like those periods. I immediately have a different vision of humanity and my life.
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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.