Orhan Pamuk, 'Who Do You Write For?'

Erkan's blog ... source of many interesting things offered up this Herald Tribune article by renowned Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk.

That is the question.

For the last 30 years - since I first became a writer - this is the question I've heard most often from both readers and journalists. Their motives depend on the time and the place, as do the things they wish to know. But they all use the same suspicious, supercilious tone of voice.

...It is because all writers have a deep desire to be authentic that even after all these years I still love to be asked for whom I write. But while a writer's authenticity does depend on his ability to open his heart to the world in which he lives, it depends just as much on his ability to understand his own changing position in that world.

There is no such thing as an ideal reader, free of narrow-mindedness and unencumbered by social prohibitions or national myths, just as there is no such thing as an ideal novelist. But a novelist's search for the ideal reader - be he national or international - begins with the novelist's imagining him into being, and then by writing books with him in mind.