Orhan Pamuk Quotes

Art does not reproduce the visible; it makes visible.

The artist does not draw what he sees, but what he has to make others see.

I write what I see; I paint what I am.

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

If art has a purpose, it is to interpret life, reproduce it in fresh visions.

Unlike fashion, art isn't applied. It doesn't have to serve anybody. It doesn't have to be there for any other reason than to give an impression of what the world is about.

You can turn something into art just because of the way you tell people to look at it.

One can re-create what was in the mind of a mathematician a thousand years ago, recapture the truth of the intellect wherever it may have once come to light; but the image of art, that infinite variable of perception and expression in the individual, - that is not easily re-created, at least, not with certainty and in its original fulness.

The thing about good art is that it makes you look at things in a new way.

Art is the microscope of the mind, which sharpens the wit as the other does the sight; and converts every object into a little universe in itself. Art may be said to draw aside the veil from nature. To those who are perfectly unskilled in the practice, unimbued with the principles of art, most objects present only a confused mass.

Only by art can we get outside ourselves, instead of seeing only one world, our own, we see it under multiple forms.

An artists job is to see. And to go out in the world and see it firsthand, just as it is; to report with line and words what is seen. To be in the world, not just study about the world, that is the artists task

(Art is) the residue of vision.

I love the medium of photography, for with its unique realism it gives me the power to go beyond conventional ways of seeing and understanding and say, This is real, too.

All technical refinements discourage me. Perfect photography, larger screens, hi-fi sound, all make it possible for mediocrities slavishly to reproduce nature; and this reproduction bores me. What interests me is the interpretation of life by an artist. The personality of the film maker interests me more than the copy of an object.

Changing how we see images is clearly one way to change the world.

The true painter strives to paint what can only be seen through his world.

I said the photograph isn't what was photographed, it's something else. It's about transformation. And that's what it is.

My own eyes are no more than scouts on a preliminary search, for the camera's eye may entirely change my idea, even switch me to different subject matter. So I start out with my mind as free from image as the silver film on which I am to record, and I hope as sensitive.

Being a creative person. It's so much more rewarding when you find things on your own, to live whatever the writers are writing or to display what the director is looking for. You are the thing that everybody uses to get the story out.

When someone tells you it’s a grain of sand, there’s a moment where your reality falls apart and you have to reconstruct it. You have to step back and ask what the image is and what it means.

A drawing should be a verdict on the model. Don't confuse a drawing with a map.

My films are misinterpreted all the time. I don't mind that. Everybody's films are misinterpreted. But there's no malice or stupidity in the people that misinterpret them. You know what you do, but someone else sees it, and they want to talk about it or write about it, and so they misinterpret them.

An artist is a person who has invented an artist.

If an overgrown child draws something on a piece of paper, you can't ask the paper what the drawing is supposed to represent.