WHY WRITE?

While procrastinating on my own current writing project, I came across a link to Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk's recent Nobel prize lecture. Unlike many of the winners of that literary prize in the past few years, I'm actually familiar with his work, having read both his magnum opus The Black Book and his road novel The New Life (his most recent book, Snow, still sits on my bookshelf and taunts me). Pamuk's style is mysterious, dense and culturally allusive, sometimes recalling a Borges story writ large. He recently escaped being charged with the crime of "anti-Turkishness" for refering in an interview to the Armenian genocide in his country during World War 1. A major theme of his work is the intersection of European and Islamic culture, and there's no better time for such a writer to be honored.

In his lecture he pays tribute to his father, who set him on the literary path, and considers why he writes:

As you know, the question we writers are asked most often, the favourite question, is; why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write! I write because I can't do normal work like other people. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can only partake in real life by changing it. I write because I want others, all of us, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at all of you, so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page, I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all of life's beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story, but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but – just as in a dream – I can't quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.