What is the thing you want most from me? What can I do to make you love me?' Be yourself,' said Ipek.

Most of the time it's not the Europeans who belittle us. What happens when we look at them is that we belittle ourselves. When we undertake the pilgrimage, it's not just to escape the tyranny at home but also to reach to the depths of our souls. The day arrives when the guilty must return to save those who could not find the courage to leave.

The entire world was like a palace with countless rooms whose doors opened into one another. We were able to pass from one room to the next only by exercising our memories and imaginations, but most of us, in our laziness, rarely exercised these capacities, and forever remained in the same room.

There's a lot of pride involved in my refusal to believe in god.

The first thing I learned at school was that some people are idiots; the second thing I learned was that some are even worse.

We're not stupid! We're just poor! And we have a right to insist on this distinction

I am proud to be a Turk, and to write in Turkish about Turkey - and to have been translated into about 40 languages. But I don't want to politicize things by dramatizing them.