Orhan Pamuk
Orhan Pamuk
Ferit Orhan Pamukis a Turkish novelist, screenwriter, academic and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. One of Turkey's most prominent novelists, his work has sold over thirteen million books in sixty-three languages, making him the country's best-selling writer...
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 June 1952
CityIstanbul, Turkey
The fueling of anti-Turkish sentiment in Europe is resulting in an anti-European, indiscriminate nationalism in Turkey.
everyday fancy lives museum paintings
A museum should not just be a place for fancy paintings but should be a place where we can communicate our lives through our everyday objects.
I don't like to make strong statements. I want to write strong novels... I keep my deep, radical things for my novels.
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I am a Turk. I've lived in Turkey for 43 years, and for that reason my political observations are about Turkey, because that's what I know.
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I blame him for his weakness and lack of determination. At the beginning of this year we had a wave of nationalist incidents and attacks on the E.U. project, including some by members of his own party. He did not look the problem in the eye and draw a clear line between anti-E.U. nationalism and the attitude of tolerance. He tried to avoid the subject.
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Of course I'm for Turkey joining the EU. But it's too simple to say that will make us all well-off and solve all our problems. Since the referendums in France and the Netherlands, Europe is preoccupied with itself. Various ideas are competing with one another about the character of the Union. Will Europe define itself exclusively through the past ? This is a conservative view and can ultimately be reduced to discussions on agricultural policy and the distribution of funds. This is always the case with short-term politics. But in the long term Europe needs an all-encompassing vision of itself and for that reason I recommend that Turkey joins.
crime
There is nothing that constitutes a crime in this interview.
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For a country to enter the EU, there has to be full respect of minority rights, freedom of thought and expression. If you drag your feet and make cosmetic changes ... then this won't do. To believe that, you would need to be a child.
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There is no doubt that it will raise questions about the wisdom of Turkey's EU membership bid. How can it possibly claim to be a European country if it has such laws on the books, and if public prosecutors can bring such cases?
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The truly great books are always novels: 'Anna Karenina,' 'The Brothers Karamazov,' 'The Magic Mountain.' Just as with 'Shahnameh,' I browse these books from time to time to remember how a great book works on us or to teach my students at Columbia University.
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'The Museum of Innocence' is not about politics; it's a love story, but I think it's political in the sense that it wants to capture how a man suppresses a woman.
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One side of me is very busy paying attention to the details of life, the humanity of people, catching the street voices, the middle-class, upper-middle-class secret lives of Turks. The other side is interested in history and class and gender, trying to get all of society in a very realistic way.
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I have the legacy of my father and his nocturnal automatic waking up. But I like those periods. I immediately have a different vision of humanity and my life.
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Good fiction is about asserting the beauties of the world, inventing a new, positive thing. Where am I going to get that? And it should be original; it should not be cliched. So the way I looked at history was not to accuse it of failure.