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I HAVE BEEN WRITING FOR THIRTY YEARS. I have been reciting these words for some time now. I've been reciting them for so long, in fact, that they have ceased to be true: for now I am entering my thirty-first year as a writer. I do still like saying that I've been writing novels for thirty years. Though this is a bit of an exaggeration. From time to time, I do other sorts of writing-essays, criticism, reflections on Istanbul or politics, and speeches for wonderful events like this. But my true vocation, the thing that binds me to life, is writing novels. There are plenty of brilliant writers who've been writing much longer than I, who've been writing for half a century without paying this much attention. There are also the great writers to whom I return again and again, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Thomas Mann, whose careers spanned more than fifty years. So why do 1 make so much of my own thirtieth anniversary as a writer? I do so because I wish to talk about writing, and most particularly novel-writing, as a habit.
In order to be happy, I must have my daily dose of literature. In this I am no different from the patient who must take a spoon of medicine each day. When I learned, as a child, that diabetics needed an injection every day, like most people, I felt bad for them; I may even have thought of them as half dead. My dependence on literature must make me "half dead" in the same way. When I was a young writer, especially, I sensed that others saw me as "cut off from the real world" and so doomed to be "half dead." Or perhaps the right expression is "half ghost." I have sometimes even entertained the thought that I was fully dead and trying to breathe life back into my corpse with literature. For me, literature is medicine. Like the medications that others take by spoon or injection, my daily dose of literature-my daily fix, if you will-must meet certain standards.
First, the medicine must be good. Its goodness is what tells me how true and strong it is. To read a dense, deep passage in a novel, to...