I love commuting between languages just like I love commuting between cultures and cities.
If there is no love between the author and the story, there is no love between the reader and the story.
When societies go backwards and slide into authoritarianism, nationalism, and tribalism, machismo and sexism are also emboldened.
Politicians and leaders who see the media as 'the enemy within' divide society into two clashing cultural camps. Populist demagogues benefit from binary oppositions.
My readers are surprisingly mixed. I have conservative readers - for instance, women with headscarves - but also many liberal, leftist, feminist, nihilist, environmentalist, and secularist readers. Next to those are mystics, agnostics, Kurds, Turks, Alevis, Sunnis, gays, housewives, and businesswomen.
I write as if I were drunk. It is a process of intuition rather than placing myself above my story like a puppeteer pulling strings. For me, it's a scary, chaotic process over which I have little control. Words demand other words, characters resist me.
Books change us. Books save us. I know this because it happened to me. Books saved me. So, I do believe through stories we can learn to change, we can learn to empathize and be more connected with the universe and with humanity.
I find families intriguing, perhaps because I did not grow up in one. I was raised by a feminist, independent, single mother, a divorcee.
We need a dose of doubt and a dose of faith, to challenge each other.
Writing is a tribute to solitude. It is choosing introversion over extroversion, lonely hours/days/weeks/years over fun and sociability.
It is tiring to be Turkish. The country is badly polarised, bitterly politicized. Every writer, journalist, poet knows that because of an article, a novel, an interview, a poem or a tweet you can be sued, put on trial, even arrested. Self-censorship is widespread.
When I was 10 years old, we moved to Spain with my mother. I learned Spanish before I learned English. But the English language stayed with me.
If you are a writer from Turkey, Pakistan, Nigeria, Egypt, you don't have the luxury of being apolitical. You can't say, 'That's politics. I'm just doing my work.'
There are two different ways of writing a novel. The first I call the traditional father way, when the novelist slightly situates himself or herself above the text and knows what each and every character is going to do. It's a bit like engineering. I've never felt close to that tradition. I like the second way, which relies a bit more on intuition.
I spent my entire childhood observing people. I still do.
I write with humour about sadness, to introduce an element of sweet to the sour, a bit like Turkish food.
God is the biggest storyteller, and when we create stories, we connect with him and with each other across cultural, religious and gender boundaries.
For me, writing stories is one way of feeling connected to the universe and God.
The only way to learn writing is by writing. Talent, as charming as it sounds, amounts to no more than 12 per cent of the process. Work is 80 per cent. The remaining 8 per cent is 'luck' or 'zeitgeist' - in short, things that are not in our hands.
Bad writing is like a bad relationship. Don't be addicted to it just because you are familiar with its ways. Let go.
