Orhan Pamuk Quotes

A writer needs a life of introspection.

And here in my isolation I can grow stronger. Poetry seems to come of itself, without effort, and I need only let myself dream a little while painting to suggest it.

A writer in someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is.

Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.

The positive thing about writing is that you connect with yourself in the deepest way. You get a chance to know who you are, to know what you think. You begin to have a relationship with your mind.

a novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living - so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings around, darts, dashes, and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination.

A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.

You have to remember that writing itself is so solitary. You start writing because you're lonely.

I write. I imagine. The act of imagining in itself enlivens me. I am not frozen and paralyzed before the predator. I invent characters. At times I feel as if I am digging up people from the ice in which reality enshrouded them, but maybe, more than anything else, it is myself that I am now digging up.

Writing is the crack through which you can crawl into a bigger world, into your wild mind.

Writing is the act of discovery.

One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters.

The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.

Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed.

A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.

I don't have many friends. It's not because I'm a misanthrope. It's because I'm reserved. I'm self-contained. I get all my adventures in my head when I'm writing my books.

I've spent my life alone in a room with a typewriter.

I spent a lot of my childhood in my own head, making up stories. I didn't have a lot of outside influences, so I was able to make my own decisions about what I wanted to do.

Creating is a lonely thing in a lot of ways.

I get caught up in my bubble of reading, writing, or music.

The writer's is an interior world, a world of the mind.

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

I don't know why I write what I write.

I got in touch with the creative process between the age of 14 and 16, mainly because I was alone so much.

The one happiness is to shut one's door upon a little room, with a table before one, and to create; to create life in that isolation from life.