An Interview with Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk is a famous Turkish writer who was born in 1952 in Istanbul. He was a student at Robert College in high school and he studied architecture at college, but at that time he decided that he wanted to write.

His novels are, Cevdet Bey and His Sons, The Silent House, The White Castle, The Black Book, The New Life, My Name Is Red, Snow, and Istanbul: Memories and the City.

Here you will read an interview that was conducted in London with him in 2004.

Interviewer: How do you feel when you are interviewed?

Orhan Pamuk: I sometimes feel nervous because I need to be very careful when I speak Turkish or English. All your words and sentences are very important when you are interviewed. In Turkey, I have been attacked because of my answers for the interviews.

Interviewer: Do you have a special place to write your books?

Orhan Pamuk: I believe that it is important to have a special place when you write where you don’t share with anybody else. I think that the other things or people in that room destroy my inspiration so I need a separate place for myself. Therefore, I have an office or I write in a little place out of the house. Once, I had to sleep and write in the same room that I shared with my ex-wife. We didn’t have any space in the house when we lived abroad. That didn’t go well since I always felt the reminders of my family life by my side. So I had to find a solution. I started to go out of the house to find a suitable place to write. Every day I went somewhere to write and came back home like coming back from work. Now, I have a flat with the Bosporus view of İstanbul and my desk looks out onto the view. Of course, it is full of books and every day I spend ten hours there.

Interviewer: Ten hours a day? Isn’t it too much?

Orhan Pamuk: I am in love with what I do and I am hard working. It is not just work, it is also fun for me.

Interviewer: Thanks for spending time with us to answer our questions.

Orhan Pamuk: You are welcome. It is always exciting to answer the questions that make people wonder.