More than enough for a writer
From Orhan Pamuk, “My Father’s Suitcase,” Nobel Lecture, December 6, 2006:
My father had a good library — 1,500 volumes in all — more than enough for a writer. By the age of 22, I had perhaps not read them all, but I was familiar with each book — I knew which were important, which were light but easy to read, which were classics, which an essential part of any education, which were forgettable but amusing accounts of local history, and which French authors my father rated very highly. Sometimes I would look at this library from a distance and imagine that one day, in a different house, I would build my own library, an even better library — build myself a world. When I looked at my father’s library from afar, it seemed to me to be a small picture of the real world. But this was a world seen from our own corner, from Istanbul.
August 10th, 2007 21:30
[...] This issue also includes John Pinker on Gombrowicz. Gombrowitz – definitely among my 1,500. [...]