\nLittle Asia on the Hill<\/a> is a fascinating NYT article about the huge number of Asian-American students on the Berkeley campus.\n<\/p>\n \nThis morning, I read Orhan Pamuk's Nobel Lecture: My Father's Suitcase<\/a>, an essay that stirred up deep emotional wells in me as a writer and a son. A choice quote:\n<\/p>\n Little Asia on the Hill is a fascinating NYT article about the huge number of Asian-American students on the Berkeley campus. This morning, I read Orhan Pamuk’s Nobel Lecture: My Father’s Suitcase, an essay that stirred up deep emotional wells … Continue reading The writer’s secret is not inspiration—for it
\nis never clear where that comes from—but stubbornness, endurance. The
\nlovely Turkish expression “to dig a well with a needle” seems to me to
\nhave been invented with writers in mind. In the old stories, I love the
\npatience of Ferhat, who digs through mountains for his love—and I
\nunderstand it, too. When I wrote, in my novel “My Name Is Red,” about
\nthe old Persian miniaturists who drew the same horse with the same
\npassion for years and years, memorizing each stroke, until they could
\nre-create that beautiful horse even with their eyes closed, I knew that
\nI was talking about the writing profession, and about my own life. If a
\nwriter is to tell his own story—to tell it slowly, and as if it were a
\nstory about other people—if he is to feel the power of the story rise
\nup inside him, if he is to sit down at a table and give himself over to
\nthis art, this craft, he must first be given some hope. The angel of
\ninspiration (who pays regular visits to some and rarely calls on
\nothers) favors the hopeful and the confident, and it is when a writer
\nfeels most lonely, when he feels most doubtful about his efforts, his
\ndreams, and the value of his writing, when he thinks that his story is
\nonly his story—it is at such moments that the angel chooses to reveal
\nto him the images and dreams that will draw out the world he wishes to
\nbuild. If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my life, I
\nam most surprised by those moments when I felt as if the sentences and
\npages that made me ecstatically happy came not from my own imagination
\nbut from another power, which had found them and generously presented
\nthem to me. <\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"