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 got to be White House chief of staff, ten years of congressman, secretary of defense, vice-president. If you're a political junkie like I obviously am - that was - every one of those was just a tremendous experience. I'm very comfortable with what I did and why I did it and how I did it. And I'll let others judge whether they liked it or not.

Short of a space-alien invasion or an Oklahoma tornado, there is almost no problem that a democracy can tackle in a year. But that isn't why we have a government. We have a government to solve the problems that greedy, short-sighted businessmen like me can't.

Without an educated populace, democracy cannot sustain itself.

I'm really interested in how we view the public figure, what makes a public figure, what makes a celebrity, and how images make politicians, so I take an interest in politics, but it's really an interest in the image.