In a brutal country like ours, where human life is 'cheap', it's stupid to destroy yourself for the sake of your beliefs. Beliefs? High ideas? Only people in rich countries can enjoy such luxuries.

Well, on the one hand the Turks have the legitimate need to defend their national dignity - and this includes being recognized as a part of the west and Europe.

My decision to view the world through novels, as it were, which is a typically European way of looking at things, became a heavy burden for me. But I took it on consciously, even though it was torture for me.

Mankind's greatest error, the biggest deception of the past thousand years is this: to confuse poverty with stupidity.

I see Turkey's future as being in Europe, as one of many prosperous, tolerant, democratic countries.

People only tell lies when there is something they are terribly frightened of losing.

The bloody years of war and all the atrocities in European history have taught the Europeans that secular politics free of religious hatred is mainly a question of peace. This concept is not anchored in the same way in the consciousness of Turks, which has to do with the fact that the secular was forced upon us by the army.