Orhan Pamuk

INTERVIEWER
Where do you write?

PAMUK
I have always thought that the place where you sleep or the place you share with your partner should be separate from the place where you write. The domestic rituals and details somehow kill the imagination. They kill the demon in me. The domestic, tame daily routine makes the longing for the other world, which the imagination needs to operate, fade away. So for years I always had an office or a little place outside the house to work in. I always had different flats. But once I spent half a semester in the U.S. while my ex-wife was taking her Ph.D. at Columbia University. We were living in an apartment for married students and didn’t have any space, so I had to sleep and write in the same place. Reminders of family life were all around. This upset me. In the mornings I used to say goodbye to my wife like someone going to work. I’d leave the house, walk around a few blocks, and come back like a person arriving at the office. Ten years ago I found a flat overlooking the Bosporus with a view of the old city. It has, perhaps, one of the best views of Istanbul. It is a twenty-five minute walk from where I live. It is full of books and my desk looks out onto the view. Every day I spend, on average, some ten hours there.

INTERVIEWER
Ten hours a day?

PAMUK
Yes, I’m a hard worker. I enjoy it. People say I’m ambitious, and maybe there’s truth in that too. But I’m in love with what I do. I enjoy sitting at my desk like a child playing with his toys. It’s work, essentially, but it’s fun and games also.

The Paris Review, Fall/Winter 2005

Comments

[Marian O'Brien Paul]

I wish I could have a little space to write in overlooking the Bosporus and the old city. I have lovely memories of spending a few days there in 1988 with my youngest daughter. I was a Fulbright Junior Lecturer teaching EFL at Cukurova Univ. and she was attending Tarsus American School. We were on winter break, traveled there from Adana by bus, found a pension w/wonderful proprieters - a Turkish man and his Japanese wife - visited the Blue Mosque, Aya Sofya, Capali Carsi, ate stuffed mussels on a floating restaurant below the Galata Bridge, took a ferry ride across the Bosporus, visited the underground cisterns and walked all over the Topkapi palace. What lovely memories!!
a lovely time!