My Father's Suitcase

Also by Orhan Pamuk...the text of his Nobel lecture, 2006 courtesy of the New Yorker:
"When I speak of writing, the image that comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem or a literary tradition; it is the person who shut himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward. Amid his shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man—or this woman—may use a typewriter, or profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I do. As he writes, he may drink tea or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time, he may rise from his table to look out the window at the children playing in the street, or if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or even at a black wall. He may write poems, or plays, or novels, as I do. But all these differences arise only after the crucial task is complete—after he has sat down at the table and patiently turned inward. To write is to transform that inward gaze into words, to study the worlds into which we pass when we retire into ourselves, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy."
www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/061225fa_fact1