Top 35 Istanbul Quotes

I love visiting churches and I think I’ve visited every mosque in Istanbul.

If one had but a single glance to give the world, one should gaze on Istanbul.

There’s different shopping in Paris than there is at a bazaar in Istanbul, but they’re all wonderful.

I came across humanity in Istanbul, and all I know about life comes from Istanbul, and definitely, I am writing about Istanbul. I also love the city because I live there, it has formed me, and it’s me. Of course it is natural. If somebody lived all his life in Delhi, he will write about Delhi.

The Taj, the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, Cracao Basilica and Polish church are some monuments that hold a special place in my memory.

The terrorists who committed the 2003 Istanbul attacks were locals, that is, Turks. And when filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered in the Netherlands last year, the murderer and his supporters were also part of the Muslim community.

I don’t much care whether rural Anatolians or Istanbul secularists take power. I’m not close to any of them. What I care about is respect for the individual.

Istanbul in the snow is a wonder. The extravagant pleasures on show in the Topkapi Palace Museum – the sultan’s robes thickly lined with squirrel fur, mobile foot-braziers to keep out a cold that whips relentlessly off the Bosphorus – presage modern-day sultanic delights.

Turks have long admired the sultan, Mehmet II, for his military triumphs, especially his capture of Constantinople, now known as Istanbul, in 1453.

I see more people taking on the cloak of accountability, more people tiring of the blame game. If we are all connected and our actions in Australia affect us in Istanbul, then we are all to blame and all to be healers. We can’t blame lawyers anymore for the ‘liability’ vs. common sense imbalance.

There are such beautiful locations outside India, and the experience of shooting in Istanbul was awesome.

I read, read enormously on all different fields of Islamic thought, from philosophy to Islamic literature, poetry, exegeses, knowledge of the Hadith, the teachings of the prophet. That’s how I trained myself. And then I was appointed imam by a Sufi master from Istanbul, Turkey.

When I was growing up, many of my relatives had never seen a black person before. Today, hundreds, maybe thousands of Africans live in Istanbul’s old city alone. It’s hard to imagine their lives in their human totality.

I found that the loudest fans in the world are in Istanbul.

The head of ISIS called for attacks during the season of Ramadan, which is what you have seen both in Orlando and now in Istanbul at the airport.

I really enjoyed my first Istanbul derby.

The only thing I regret is not winning the Premier League with Liverpool. I’ll never know how that feels and experience the reaction of the city, as I did after Istanbul. It hurts because I know the people want the league title more than anything.

Istanbul is an unbelievable city, just really beautiful and the people are really, really nice.

I left New York after my mother died and, rather aimlessly, had settled in Istanbul for a change of scene. It was a rather dramatic gesture on my part, since I’d lived in New York for 20 years, but I felt I needed something different – the escalating expense and pressure of New York had begun to weary me.

So far, I have not come to any of the positions that I have filled through wanting to be there. I was sought – people wanted me to come to those posts. I am talking about all my positions: mayor of Istanbul, chairman of the party, prime minister.

The coffee’s good in Italy. It’s good in Spain. It’s good in Istanbul. The coffee’s not so good in America.

Istanbul is a vast place. There are very conservative neighbourhoods, there are places that are upper class, Westernised, consuming Western culture.

When the whole world reads your books, is there any other happiness for a writer? I am happy that my books are read in 57 languages. But I am focused on Istanbul not because of Istanbul but because of humanity. Everyone is the same in the end.

Almost everything I have read about Istanbul talks about it as the gateway to the east. We’re so programmed to think of it like that but for much of the world, it’s the gateway to the west, or even where north meets south.

I have been on dialysis in Istanbul, Milan, Indonesia, Manila, London. It’s – it’s amazing.

Marseilles, Barcelona, Trieste, Istanbul – each romances the Mediterranean in its own fashion, mostly by embracing the sea in sweeping C-shaped bays that date back to antiquity.

Istanbul is inspiring because it has its own code of architecture, literature, poetry, music.

Culture is mix. Culture means a mix of things from other sources. And my town, Istanbul, was this kind of mix. Istanbul, in fact, and my work, is a testimony to the fact that East and West combine cultural gracefully, or sometimes in an anarchic way, came together, and that is what we should search for.

I had the feeling that focusing on objects and telling a story through them would make my protagonists different from those in Western novels – more real, more quintessentially of Istanbul.

The Lumiere brothers first exhibited moving pictures in Paris in 1896. A year later, there was a private showing at the Yildiz palace in Istanbul.

The first time I held an African drum in my hands was at Koc University in a forest in the northern suburbs of Istanbul.

At the time when I started, coming out of football, I always used a forearm or an elbow. When it became Bionic is when I said it was Bionic. I went to some secret doctor in Istanbul who put some Bionic stuff in there.

We spent a month in Japan last year, a week in Istanbul for the United Nations, and nearly three months in my native Nova Scotia, where my two brothers have homes; and we’ll go back there this summer.

In Zagreb, the Old Town really could be Prague. You go two hours to the coast to Opatija, and you really could be in the South of France, in the Croatian Riviera. And then you head down the coast towards Split, and you get into more Turkish architecture, so you can double Istanbul.

I once stayed in a roach-infested hotel in Istanbul for a work trip. I had to share my room with a male model, and pointedly all we talked about was our other halves.