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Orhan Pamuk:
During our conversations in the attic, Kemal rarely referred to the details of the happy days of lovemaking he and Füsun shared in the spring of 1974. Yet I always thought these details were necessary to the novel. He was uncomfortable talking about sex, but not about kissing, which he spoke about more readily. During one of our late-night rakı drinking sessions, I found out that he sometimes associated kissing with visions of a mother seagull putting food into her impatient chicks’ open beaks. As a child who had grown up seeing seagulls nesting on the roofs and chimney tops of Istanbul, I knew what he meant. He also said that kissing made him think of a seagull gently holding a fig in its beak, and I suggested that we commission a painting of kissing seagulls to hang in a corner of our museum. “Yes, but I don’t want anything by these new copycat painters,” Kemal had said. “Find something in an old book. And make sure that you can see the juice dripping from the fig!”