Writings on Life, Art, Books and Cities
The Implied Author
This is a book made of ideas, images and fragments of life that have still not found their way into one of my novels
To describe such epiphanies, such curious moments when truth is somehow illuminated, Virginia Woolf once used the term "moments of being"
For this he needs paper, a pen, and the optimism of a child looking at the universe for the first time
To talk about Istanbul, or to discuss my favorite books, authors and paintings, has for me always an excuse to talk about my life
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
For thirty years I have spent an average of ten hours a day alone in a room (to write)
Days are specially difficult when you don't do any writing
The real hunger here is not for literature but for a room where I can be alone with my thoughts.
In such a room I can invent beautiful dreams
I make the new worlds from the stuff of the known world
The pleasure I take in this confession and the fear I feel speaking honestly about myself - together they lead me to a serious and important insight
Writing is a solace, even a remedy
A novel is inspired by ideas, passions, furies and desires - this all we know. To please our lovers, to belittle our enemies, to extol something we adore, to delight in speaking authoritatively about something of which we know nothing, to take pleasures in time lost and remembered, to dream of making love or reading or engaging with politics, to indulge in one's particular worries, one's personal habits these and any number of other obscure or even nonsensical desires are what shape us, in ways both clear and mysterious
These same desires inspire the daydream to which we give voice
We surrender to this mysterious wind like a captain who has no idea where he's bound
To write a novel is to be open to these desires, winds and inspirations
If I am in the middle of a novel and writing well, I enter easily into its dreams
(Novels) offer the writer solid and sound world in which to lose himself and seek happiness
Most of the time I have no desire to return to the real life or to reach the end of the novel
(While writing it is) as if I am in a world where I can see into every house, car ship, and building because they are all made of glass; they have begun to reveal to me their secrets
My job is to divine the rules and listen: to watch with pleasure the going-on in each interior...
An imaginative novelist's greatest virtue is his ability to forget the world in the way a child does
I needn't work in the order of reading
For every unwritten but dreamed and planned novel there must be an implied (involved) writer
My Father
For him, life was not something to be earned but to be enjoyed
I feel like a bullet that's been fired for no reason
Every man's death begins with the death of his father
Notes on April 29,1994
Night: the noise of the city changed, turning into a whisper, a sleepy sigh
When the Furniture is Talking, How Can You Sleep
If there were a light bulb burning inside my skull, somewhere deep inside, between my eyes and my mouth, how beautiful that light would ooze from my pores
When the world is shimmering with so many curiosities and signs, how can anyone sleep?
I try to calm myself by telling myself that people cannot have so little interest in these signs
In a while, when I'm asleep, I too shall become part of a story
Giving Up Smoking
So this was the main purpose of cigarettes in my life: to slow the experience of pleasures and pain, desire and defeat, sadness and joy, the present and future; and between each frame, to find new roads and shortcuts
All I want is to return to the man I once was
As you can see, writing - if you're happy with it - undoes all sorrows
My Wristwatches
I've caught myself thinking, how quickly time passed!
Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground
When he first sits to wrote down, the author cannot know where his work will lead
Dostoyevsky's Fearsome Demons
Demons, in my view, is the greatest political novel of all time
When we read this novel, it seems as if the smallest details of ordinary life are tied to the characters' grand thought, and it is by seeing such connections that we enter the fearful world of the paranoid, in which all thoughts and great ideals are linked to one another
Dostoyevsky offers us a hero who commits suicide to confirm both these ideas - man's freedom and God's presence
Radical intellectuals wish to hide from us
The Brother Karamazov
It made me feel as if I was not alone in the world but also made me feel helpless and cut off from all others
I felt as I were the first person who had ever read this book
For some writers, the world is a place that has fully matured, a finished state
The joys of reading Flaubert and Nabokov are not of discovering the great idea in the author's mind but of observing their attention to detail and their expert narration
For a writer like Dostoyevsky, the world is a place that is in the process of becoming, unfinished, it is somehow lacking
The Brother Karamazov is a fundamental text, best read while youth
Albert Camus
As time goes on, therefore, we cannot remember reading writers without also revisiting the world as we know it when we first read them and recalling the inchoate longing they awoke in us
These authors, read when you're in youth and reasonably hopeful, will inspire you to want to write books as well
This philosophy (of absurd) came to us not from the great cities of the West.. But from a marginalized part-modern, part-Muslim, part- Mediterranean like others
The landscape in which Camus sets The Stranger, The Plague, and many of his short stories is the landscape of his own childhood, and his loving, minute descriptions of sunny streets and gardens belongs neither to the East nor to the West
When the news came that he had died, still young and handsome, in a traffic accident the newspaper were only too eager to call "absurd"
The reader is inevitably struck by two things: the distance between Camus and his subject and his soft, almost whispering mode of narration
This (The Guest) perfect political story portrays politics not as something we have eagerly chosen for ourselves but as an unhappy accident that we are obliged to accept
Reading Thomas Bernhard in a Time of happiness
Books had prepared me for life, books were mostly what kept me going on
Life can never be more than what our passions and perversions make of it
Mario Vargas Llosa and Third World Literature
If there is anything that distinguishes third world literature, it is not the poverty, violence, politics, or social turmoil of the country from where it issues but rather the author's awareness that his work is somehow remote from the centers where the history of his art - the art of the novel - is described, and he reflects this distance in his work