Other Colors

Other Colors

Orhan Pamuk

I have come to see the work of literature less as narrating the world than "seeing the world with words". From the moments he begins to use words like colors in a painting, a writer can begin to see how wondrous and surprising the world is, and he breaks the bones of language to find his own voice. For this he needs paper, a pen, and the optimism of a child looking at the world for the first time

I have always believed there to be a greedy and almost implacable graphomaniac inside me - a creature who can never write enough, who is forever setting life in words- and that to make him happy I need to keep writing. But when I was putting this book together, I discovered that the graphomaniac would be much happier, and less pained by his writing illness, if he worked with an editor who gave his writings a center, a frame, and a meaning. I would like the sensitive reader to pay as much attention to my creative editing as to the effort I put into the writing itself.

I am hardly alone in being a great admirer of the German writer-philosopher Walter Benjamin. But to anger one friend who is too much in awe of him (she's an academic, of course), I sometimes ask, "what is so great about this writer? He managed to finish only a few books, and if he's famous, it's not for the work he finished but the work he never managed to complete." My friend replies that Benjamin's oeuvre is, like life itself, boundless and therefore fragmentary, and this was why so many literary critics tried so hard to give the pieces meaning, just as they did with life. And every time I smile and say, "One day I'll write a book that's made only from fragments too." This is that book, set inside a frame to suggest a center that I have tried to hide: I hope that readers will enjoy imagining that center into being.

My true vocation, the thing that binds me to life, is writing novels.

In order to be happy I must have my daily dose of literature. In this I am no different from the patient who must take a spoon of medicine each day. When I learned as a child, that diabetics needed an injection every day, I felt bad for them as anyone might; I may even have thought of them as half dead. My dependence on literature must make me half dead in the same way.

An imaginative novelist's great virtue is his ability to forget the world in the way a child does, to be irresponsible and delight in it

Every man's death begins with the death of his father

The biggest trauma of life is, of course, love.

In a while, when I'm asleep, I too shall become part of a story

But it's as if the seagull is not dying so much as being saved from life

Watching the world from the corner of her eye and her father watching her watch the world

Some of the fancier places also spread the mayonnaise once known as Russian dressing but now referred to as American dressing because of the cold war.

If a novelist can finish a book without dreaming of its cover, he is wise, well-rounded, and a fully formed adult, but he's also lost the innocence that made him a novelist in the first place

A bookshop owes its allure not to its books but to the variety of their covers

Novels are only as valuable as the questions they raise about the shape and nature of life. Great novelists (and there are only a few) stay in our thoughts not because they quiz their heroes on this question directly, or engage their narrators in discussions with those who think like them, but because, as they go about describing life's petty and extraordinary details, and its problems large and small, they evoke these questions in their structure, their language, their atmosphere, their voice and tone.

But while the Birdbrained reader boasts of having understood nothing and condemns the book for defying his narrow rules, the reader of refined sensibilities feels more uneasy. Behind the smoke and noise of his anger there is the knowledge that great literature is what gives man his understanding of his place in the scheme of things, and so, reminding himself that writing is one of the deepest and most wondrously strange of human activities, he picks up the book in a moment of solitude.

Like all great novels, The Brothers Karamazov had two instant and opposite effects on me: it made me feel as if I was not alone in the world, but it also made me feel helpless and cut off from all others.

I would feel the book quivering inside me and knew that, from here on, life would never be the same

For Dostoevsky, the world is a place that is in the process of becoming; unfinished, it is somehow lacking.

He saw Turkish politics as someone else might see an accident - something that he got mixed up in without ever meaning to.

I would, if i have enough time, like to say a few words about politics and accidents. It is a subject about which I have thought a great deal. But do not worry: Though I write long novels, today I shall keep my comments brief.

I'm using this story as a way into the subject that I'm coming to understand more clearly with each new day, and that is, in my view, central to the art of the novel: the question of the "other", the "stranger", the "enemy" that resonates inside each of our heads -or, rather, the question of how to transform this being.

When we meet someone in a novel who reminds us of ourselves, our first wish is for that character to explain to us who we are.

The history of the novel is a history of human liberation.

That evening they gave us writers a big party, but I was tired, and I didn't go, I watched the party from the hotel veranda; the sounds and lights in the distant garden filtered through the leaves of the trees. For me, watching a party from a distance bespeaks a writer's stance toward life.

My comfort, my double happiness, comes from the same source: I can, without any guilt, wander between the two worlds, and in both I am at home.

If you pay close attention, the people in miniatures are at once looking into the world of the painting and also looking at the eyes observing them - in other words, at the painter or the person viewing the painting. When Husrev and Sirin come into the clearing, they look at each other, but actually their eyes don't meet, because their bodies are half turned toward us. In much the same way do my characters tell their stories, addressing each others and the reader at the same time.

The women characters, meanwhile, are only too much aware that the reader has invaded their privacy. Even as they speak, they are tidying the room, adjusting their clothes, and taking care not to say the wrong thing. The women are not comfortable being on view; they are not exhibitionists. Only when they turn the reader-observer into a confidante are they able to transform him from an outsider into a brother, creating a new plane for that relationship.

It's a character's silences, uncertainties, and sorrows that bring me close to him, not his victories or acts of courage. I would like to be loved in the same way by my readers.

So let's ask the question that I heard quite a lot twenty-five years ago and that I still ask myself from time to time. Why didn't I become an architect? Answer: Because I thought the sheets of paper on which I was to pour my dreams were blank. But after twenty-five years of writing, I have come to understand that those pages are never blank. I know very well now that when I sit down at my table, I am sitting with tradition and with those who refuse absolutely to bow to rules or to history; I am sitting with things born of coincidence and disorder, darkness, fear, and dirt, with the past and its ghosts, and all the things that officialdom and our language wish to forget; I am sitting with fear and with the dreams which fear gives rise. To bring all these things to the page, I had to write novels that drew from the past, and all the things that the Westernizers and the modern republic wished to forget, but that embraced the future and the imagination at the same time. Had I thought, at the age of twenty, that I could do the same with architecture, I might well have become an architect. But in those days I was a resolute modernist who wished to escape the burden, the filth, and the ghost-ridden twilight that was history- and what's more, I was an optimistic Westernizer, certain that all was going to plan. As for the peoples of the city in which I lived- who conformed to no rules with their complex communities and their histories- they did not figure in my dreams: I saw them instead as obstacles, there to keep my dreams from being realized. I understood at once that they would never let me make the sorts of buildings I wanted in those streets. But they would not object if I shut myself up in my own house and wrote about them.

My Name Is Red at its deepest level is about the fear of being forgotten

If there's a garden in your dreams- a garden you have never seen in life, perhaps because it is on the other side of a high wall - the best way to imagine that unseen garden is to tell stories that evoke your hopes and fears.

"I'm a copy of something, but I've forgotten what that something is"

As a book takes shape in my mind, i believe myself to be at the beginning of everything; I believe that the world will conform to my ideas- just as I did when I dreamed up buildings as an architectural student.