Orhan Pamuk Quotes

The act of loving is an act of self-evolution even when the purpose of the act is someone else's growth.

Love makes you want to be a better man. But maybe love, real love, also gives you permission to just be the man you are.

The will to grow is, in essence, the same phenomenon as love. Genuinely loving people are, by definition, growing people.

In love lies the seed of our growth. The more we love, the closer we are to the spiritual experience.

it is better to take experience, to suffer, to love, and to remember than to walk unscathed between the fires. I've had most immunities myself - the result of an independent income combined with a personality completely devoid of sexual attractions - the two fires of poverty and passion have therefore never burned me, and I am a lesser person for my safety.

But then she hadn’t just learned to love this summer – she had also learned how to need.

I was a self-centered bore. I was masochistic, and only thought I was happy. When I woke up and said, "there must be something wrong with me", I grew up. Because I never understood myself, how could I hope to understand anyone else? That's why I can truly say that now I can give a woman love for the first time in my life, because I can understand her.

If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: in love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.

You realize that especially when you're writing a book like this, looking back on your life, that there's just such a depth of understanding you acquire over time with the help of the people who love you that that's when you can really get down to what you really think and believe.

The journey from teaching about love to allowing myself to be loved proved much longer than I realised.

Beyond just writing about falling in love and out of love and wanting to do certain things and going out and partying and all the things that I grew up writing about, I want to write about deeper things.

It gets easier as you get older because life deals its particular hand, and our experiences get deeper, richer, more profound. When I gave birth to my son, something happened. It is a huge thing for a woman: a whole set of emotions you never had before arrives, and a love you never had before in your life is now on tap.

Very often a change of self is needed more than a change of scene.

I've done a lot of growing up since the age of 16 and I really wanted that to be reflected in my music.

I don't think I could have tackled 'The Pura Principle' until now. It takes me about twenty years to come to term with any difficult period in my life, to get enough of a grasp on it to fictionalize it.

I've learned not to let it be the end of the world if a boy doesn't like you. I used to put so much effort into boys. I started playing guitar because I wanted to impress this boy. Then, I ended up in love with guitar and I didn't care about the boy anymore.

Part of spiritual and emotional maturity is recognizing that it's not like you're going to try to fix yourself and become a different person. You remain the same person, but you become awakened.

The two records are very different. I guess, on the second record, that's more where I was at. Its not that I'm more well-adjusted or anything, it's just that what I wanted to sing about maybe was more the way I wanted to feel.

I've been in many relationships in my life and learned a lot from them, good and bad.

One does not fall in love; one grows into love, and love grows in him.

I have a lot of growing up to do, or a lot of growing down. I think that's probably more appropriate.

I enjoy writing about people falling in love, probably because I think the first time you fall in love is the first time that you have to figure out how you're going to orient your life. What are you going to value? What's going to be most important to you? And I think that's really interesting to write about.

Love grows more tremendously full, swift, poignant, as the years multiply.

I feel like I've been able to grow personally because of playing SpongeBob.

I think the thing about keeping your character fresh is, when you change as an individual, you have to flow with it.