I wrote 'My Name is Red' just to remember painting, where the hand does it before the intellect. When I'm captive to it, I'm a happier person. Kierkegaard tells us that a happy person is someone who lives in the present; the unhappy person, someone who lives either in the past or the future.

Istanbul is a vast place. There are very conservative neighbourhoods, there are places that are upper class, Westernised, consuming Western culture.

I have always thought that the place where you sleep or the place you share with your partner should be separate from the place where you write. The domestic rituals and details somehow kill the imagination. They kill the demon in me.

A museum should not just be a place for fancy paintings but should be a place where we can communicate our lives through our everyday objects.

I have a lot of skepticism about marriage and monogamy.

I know of a few writers who are husband and wife teams.

I'm married to a vegetarian, so if ever we go out to dinner, I go for kidneys.

You can be in love and raise a family wonderfully by not being married, but actually, marriage does give us a strength, because it's quite hard to get out of, and so it makes us fight more to keep it together. If divorce becomes dead easy - which it sort of has - then we don't have that backup. Because, for everybody, relationships are hard.