Instanbul, 1670

 

Near dawn, my guest delighted me by saying that he'd loved my story, but adding that he had to disagree with certain details... he agreed that we must seek the strange and suprising, as in my story; yes, perhaps this was the one thing we could do to combat the exhausting tedium of this world.  [...]

But we should search for the strange and suprising in the world, not in ourselves!  To search within, to think so long and hard about ourselves, this would only make us unhappy.  This is what had happened to the characters in my story: for this reason, heroes could never tolerate being themselves, for this reason they always wanted to be someone else... I was silent.

Little by little, by writing these sorts of tales, by searching for the strange within ourselves, we, too, would become someone else, and, God forbid, our readers would as well.  He did not even want to think about how terrible the world would be if men spoke always of themselves, of their own peculiarities, if their books and their stories were always about this one thing.

- Orhan Pamuk, The White Castle