A World Without Heroes

Even the best among us fail and fail a lot. So why not drop the empty notion of heroism and use an accurate method for judging humans?

Question: Who are your heroes?
Orhan Pamuk: Look, I don't want to see heroes around. I believe in a world where there are no heroes, and I've read and know humanity a lot. There are moments that I admire in a person courage, intellect, hard work. These are the qualities I admire in an intellectual, in a writer, and there are so many people who have these things. Say I admire Noam Chomsky, or say I used to admire, when I was a teenager, Jean-Paul Sartre. I like outspoken public intellectuals, but on the other hand, then I also see their failures, their vanities. They're all human beings. My policy of looking at intellectuals -- and they are most of the time people I admire -- is to pay attention to what they did best and ignore their failures, because they all fail. We are -- intellectuals, writers, in the end say something interesting. And pay attention to what they say. Then there are also uninteresting things they say, or just their failures. I don't care about that.

Question: Who are your heroes?
Orhan Pamuk: Look, I don't want to see heroes around. I believe in a world where there are no heroes, and I've read and know humanity a lot. There are moments that I admire in a person courage, intellect, hard work. These are the qualities I admire in an intellectual, in a writer, and there are so many people who have these things. Say I admire Noam Chomsky, or say I used to admire, when I was a teenager, Jean-Paul Sartre. I like outspoken public intellectuals, but on the other hand, then I also see their failures, their vanities. They're all human beings. My policy of looking at intellectuals -- and they are most of the time people I admire -- is to pay attention to what they did best and ignore their failures, because they all fail. We are -- intellectuals, writers, in the end say something interesting. And pay attention to what they say. Then there are also uninteresting things they say, or just their failures. I don't care about that.