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

I really don't want to portray the Islamists as simply evil, the way it's often done in the west.

Age had not made him less handsome, as is so often the case; it had simply made him less visible.

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

It was in Cihangir that i first learned Istanbul was not an anonymous multitude of walled-in lives - a jungle of apartments where no one knew who was dead or who was celebrating what - but an archipelago of neighbourhoods in which everyone knew each other.

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.

Turkish football serves the cause of nationalism, but not of the nation.