The knowledge that she could learn to love a man had always meant more to her than loving him effortlessly, more even than falling in love, and that was why she now felt that she was on the threshold of a new life, a happiness bound to endure for a very long time.

If Turkey become a member of the EU, of course Turks would lose a part of this identity, just as Europe would lose a part of its own. It would also be a different Europe then. Accepting Turkey into the EU is an ambitious political endeavor of historical proportions. Europe would become a strong, multi-religious unit.

Painting taught literature to describe.

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words.

Great changes in the direction of peace have often come from people who were no great advocates of peace to begin with.

The challenge is to lend conviction even to the voices which advocate views I find personally abhorrent, whether they are political Islamists or officers justifying a coup.

Before my birth there was infinite time, and after my death, inexhaustible time. I never thought of it before: I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darkness.