The Thousand and One Nights is a Marvel of Eastern Literature... Orhan Pamuk, Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami, ‘Kafka On The Shore’,2002:

"... The Burton edition has all the stories I remember reading as a child, but they’re longer, with more episodes and plot twists, and so much more absorbing that it’s hard to believe they’re the same. They’re full of obscene, violent, sexual, basically outrageous scenes. Like the genie in the bottle they have this sort of vital, living sense of play, of freedom, that common sense can’t keep bottled up … Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I’m alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world..."

Orhan Pamuk, 'Other Colors: Essays and a Story', 2007:

"... This brings us to the real subject: The Thousand and One Nights is a marvel of Eastern literature. But because we live in a culture that has severed its links with its own cultural heritage and forgotten what it owes to India and Iran, surrendering instead to the jolts of Western literature, it came back to us via Europe...

...I would still like to use this book to say something about reading and death. There are two things people always say about the Thousand and One Nights. One is that no one has ever managed to read the book from start to finish. The second is that anyone who does read it from start to finish is sure to die. Certainly an alert reader who has seen how these two warnings fit together will wish to proceed with caution. But there’s no reason for fear. Because we’re all going to die one day, whether we read the Thousand and One Nights or not …"