"Years ago one of the sheiks of Istanbul sent his dervishes out to gather flowers for their lodge. They all returned with large bouquets, except for one dervish who brought back only a single withered flower. When asked why he didn't bring back any beautiful blossoms, he answered, "I found all the flowers busy remembering the lord. How could I stop their constant prayer? I kept looking and finally one flower finished its recollection, and this is the one I brought." this dervish became the next sheikh."
"I've stood in long lines, in the rain and under the sun, just to buy a pack of butter or a box of paper napkins. I've seen mothers running after the corpses of their martyred sons, oblivious to whether their headscarves or their chadors or their stockings and shoes were slipping off or not. I won't say any more. In the light of all this, how did you expect my poetry to be joyful or, as in my recent poem, to speak of love? Even so, more than half of my poetry is joyful and these are the products of the moments when I've felt happy."
"I enter a whorehouse with the same interest as I do the British museum or the Metropolitan - in the same spirit of curiosity. Here are the works of man, here is an art of man, here is the eternal pursuit of gold and pleasure. I couldn't be more sincere. This doesn't mean that if I go to La Scala in Milan to hear Carmen I want to get up on the stage and participate. I do not. Neither do I always participate in a fine representative national whorehouse - but I must see it as a spectacle, an offering, a symptom of a nation."
"I have a dark side which I befriended and fully embrace."