Elif Safak

“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.'”

“When societies go backwards and slide into authoritarianism, nationalism, and tribalism, machismo and sexism are also emboldened.”

“I like to question cultural biases wherever I go, and I question Islamophobia as much as I question anti-western sentiment because I think all extremist ideologies are very similar.”

“I was in Madrid as a young girl and a teenager. I'll never forget when I went to the Prado Museum for the first time and saw the paintings of Goya. They had such a big impact on me.”

“I love commuting between languages just like I love commuting between cultures and cities.”

“My readers are surprisingly mixed. I have conservative readers - for instance, women with headscarves - but also many liberal, leftist, feminist, nihilist, environmentalist, and secularist r...”

“If there is no love between the author and the story, there is no love between the reader and the story.”

“Turkey is a complex country. Most readers are women, of all generations, and they are passionate about books. However, the written culture is mostly patriarchal. In general, men write; women...”

“Part of me always felt like the other, the outsider, the observer. My father had two sons with his second wife, who I didn't meet until my late 20s. I was always on the periphery. In Madrid,...”

“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 l...”

“The lack of trust in supranational entities and cosmopolitan elite creates a fertile ground for tribalist belongings and reactionary politics.”

“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 yo...”

“With 'The Forty Rules of Love,' I wanted to write a love story. But I wanted a love story with a spiritual dimension. For me, that took me to Rumi. And from Rumi, I went to Shams of Tabriz....”

“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...”