What a wonderful Lecture

Ah there are times you read something and you feel like....
thats it.... thats what.... .
There may be many excellent words to describe that feeling
but its rare to read some stuff and this weekend i felt great
as i read it... it was sort of wonderful as i re-read it.
Its a very long speech ... So long that i copied some reallly lovely lines
of it so that to find them i the time starved person needn’t
re-read it again and again.
But may be you shoud remember it anyway i thought
if you loved it so much .....
But then what you remember is a feeling ...
.sometimes the way the feeling is
expressed is a beauty unto itself.

I have not read any of his books....but just was redirected
while browsing to this wonderful complete Speech by
The Nobel Lecture, 2006 by ORHAN PAMUK.
The last para where he talks about ‘why do you write’...loved it.
I dont know how happy at heart he may be about the prize but
when i read the last line he made me happy....
cause thats why i write this blog
“I write because I have never managed to be happy.
I write to be happy.”
For people who love reading and are not scared of
scrolling long pages,
i would say the full speech must be read.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Writer’s secret is not inspiration—for it is
never clear where that comes from—but
stubbornness, endurance

If a writer is to tell his own story—to tell it
slowly, and as if it were a story about other
people—if he is to feel the power of the story
rise up inside him, if he is to sit down at a table
and give himself over to this art, this craft,
he must first be given some hope.

Now, many years later, I understand that this
discontent is the basic trait that turns
a person into a writer.

Patience and toil are not enough: first,
we must feel compelled to escape crowds,
company, the stuff of ordinary life,
and shut ourselves up in a room.

he must have the artistry to tell his own
stories as if they were other people’s stories,
and to tell other people’s stories as if they
were his own, for that is what literature is.

our literature, our local world, in all
its beloved detail—and at the other end were
the books from this other, Western world, which
bore no resemblance to ours, a lack of resemblance
that caused us both pain and hope.
To write, to read, was like leaving one
world to find consolation in the otherness
of another, in the strange and the wondrous.
I felt that my father had read novels
in order to escape his life and flee to the
West—just as I did later.

Is happiness believing that you live a deep life
in your lonely room? Or is happiness leading a
comfortable life in society, believing in the same
things as everyone else, or, at least,
acting as if you did?
Is it happiness or unhappiness to go through life
writing in secret, while seeming to be in harmony
with all that surrounds you?

For me, to be a writer is to acknowledge the
secret wounds that we carry inside us,
wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely
aware of them, and to patiently explore them,
know them, illuminate them, own them, and make
them a conscious part of our spirit and our writing.

What literature most needs to tell and to investigate
now is humanity’s basic fears: the fear of being left
outside, the fear of counting for nothing, and the
feeling of worthlessness that comes with such
fears—the collective humiliations, vulnerabilities,
slights, grievances, sensitivities, and imagined
insults, and the nationalist boasts and inflations
that are their next of kin. . . .

Why do you write?
I write because I have an innate need to write.
I write because I can’t do normal work as other
people do. I write because I want to read books
like the ones I write.
I write because I am angry at everyone.
I write because I love sitting in a room
all day writing. I write because I can partake
of real life only by changing it.
I write because I want others, the whole world,
to know what sort of life we lived, and continue
to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because
I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink.
I write because I believe in literature,
in the art of the novel, more than I believe
in anything else.
I write because it is a habit, a passion.
I write because I am afraid of being forgotten.
I write because I like the glory and
interest that writing brings.

I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because
I hope to understand why I am so very, very
angry at everyone. I write because I like
to be read. I write because once I have begun a
novel, an essay, a page I want to finish it.
I write because everyone expects me to write.
I write because I have a childish belief in the
immortality of libraries, and in the way my books
sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting
to turn all life’s beauties and riches into words.
I write not to tell a story but to
compose a story. I write because I wish to
escape from the foreboding that there is a place
I must go but—as in a dream—can’t quite get to.
I write because I have never managed to be happy.
I write to be happy.