My childhood proved to me that there could be no enjoyment of football without community. But it becomes difficult when this community is having problems with its identity. That's when we experience all possible forms of nationalist exaggeration.

Immersing oneself in the problems of a book is a good way to keep from thinking of love.

My hero wants to belong too, but he doesn't want to give up all the things he came to value in the west.

A writer in someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is.

I sometimes joke that I am the first writer of historical fiction who can look out his window and point to the objects in his novels. I have a view of the entrance to the Bosporus, the old city, Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque.

Happiness is laughing together.

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