I believe that it isn't victories but defeats that promote nationalism.

For if a lover's face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home.

Morality is probably the last thing one can learn from football.

How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known?

I work seven days a week, from 9 in the morning till 8 at night. I have the titles of the next eight novels I want to write. I feel myself pitiable, degraded on a day that I don't write.

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.

I have hired a bodyguard, on the recommendation of my friends and the government. It's outrageous, having to live like this.