Ka thought it strangely depressing that the suicide girls had had to struggle to find a private moment to kill themselves. Even after swallowing their pills, even as they lay quietly dying, they’d had to share their rooms with others.

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

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.

Many great authors of the 19th century wrote under conditions of strict censorship. The great thing about the art of writing a novel, is that you can write about anything. All you have to say is that it's fiction.

I'm a relatively disciplined writer who composes the whole book before beginning to execute and write it. Of course, you can't hold - you cannot imagine a whole novel before you write it; there are limits to human memory and imagination. Lots of things come to your mind as you write a book, but again, I make a plan, chapter, know the plot.

Let me first state forthright that contrary to what we've often read in books and heard from preachers, when you are a woman, you don't feel like the Devil.

The challenge is to lend conviction even to the voices which advocate views I find personally abhorrent, whether they are political Islamists or officers justifying a coup.