Real museums are places where Time is transformed into Space.

I really don't want to portray the Islamists as simply evil, the way it's often done in the west.

I certainly see myself more as a craftsman than as an artist.

Dogs do speak, but only to those who know how to listen.

It was in Cihangir that i first learned Istanbul was not an anonymous multitude of walled-in lives - a jungle of apartments where no one knew who was dead or who was celebrating what - but an archipelago of neighbourhoods in which everyone knew each other.

All great masters, in their work, seek that profound void within color and outside time.

I was at the end of my tether when my first book was published. For eight years I didn't make a penny, I worked so hard, didn't drink, didn't enjoy life.