The Specious Charms of Love, Heroes, and Advice

One of the more unexpected things you could hear from the mouth of a recent Nobel laureate is, “Look, I don’t want to see heroes around. I believe in a world where there are no heroes.” Yet in his Big Think Interview, these were some of the globally renowned author Orhan Pamuk’s concluding remarks.

This view of heroism, as an ideal far beyond even the best of us vanity-plagued beings, is less surprising when you discover the writer’s treatment of love in his new book (“The Museum of Innocence”): as an “almost bad” period in one’s life during which “one part of our minds observes with a bit of sadness and melancholy, thinking that this will not make us happy.”

The Columbia professor also outlined his meticulous methods for writing his novels and offered some great advice to aspiring novelists: “Don’t ever listen to either my advice or anyone else’s advice. You find your own — follow your own humors, you will find them. Just work hard and read hard.”