Orhan Pamuk Quotes

Novel-writing is, for the novelist, a game of let's pretend.

I'm a believer in using whatever works for fiction, but mostly, that's not life.

When you do fiction, it is your imagination you have put out there.

As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.

All that I did was to avail myself of the great privileges of the fiction writer, spring over every scientific difficulty with fancy’s seven-leagued boots, and create on paper what other men were planning out in steel and other metals.

What I like about writing novels is that I'm in my own world for nine months.

Authors make stuff up. Let's not pretend it's any more magical than that.

Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.

I love telling stories. Creating a character, a world, a whole universe out of nothing. That part I can't get enough of.

I think part of what I like about being a fiction writer is that I can inhabit something that's beyond the limits of my own personality.

Take it from me: I really love making things up, which is why I write fiction for a living.

The good thing about writing a novel is that you're creating an imaginary world and can take a break when you need to.

I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction.

I like going back and writing fiction.

I'm a novelist: I spend a great part of my day pretending to myself that I'm in a different world, being a different person, faced with decisions I pretend I haven't created.

Writing fiction, I really just sit there and it just comes.

Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.

When I'm writing a novel, I'm dealing with a double life. I live in the present at the same time that I live in the past with my characters. It is this that makes a novelist so eccentric and unpleasant.

Everyone else thinks I'm a nonfiction writer. I think it's because my nonfiction is easier to find. But I write both in equal measure. I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself, and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.

Being a novelist, you can roam around with a story and indulge yourself.

Like all novelists, I'm interested in the filters between reality and the imagination.

I'm a writer of fiction. I try to write about my time, but it's dangerous if I'm seen as an investigative writer. I manipulate and change and control.

When you're a writer and you're an adult, that's something you crave - that limitless imagination and love for worlds that don't exist that you can create.

As a writer of fiction, lying is the central thing to all books.