From the Nobel speech by Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, below are his words in Turkish

A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man – or this woman – may use a typewriter, profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I have done for 30 years. As he writes, he can drink tea or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time he may rise from his table to look out through the window at the children playing in the street, and, if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or he can gaze out at a black wall. He can write poems, plays, or novels, as I do. All these differences come after the crucial task of sitting down at the table and patiently turning inwards. To write is to turn this inward gaze into words, to study the world into which that person passes when he retires into himself, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy. As I sit at my table, for days, months, years, slowly adding new words to the empty page, I feel as if I am creating a new world, as if I am bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way someone might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone. The stones we writers use are words. As we hold them in our hands, sensing the ways in which each of them is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes almost caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.

In his book on the underground journalists of France during World War II, A.J. Liebling, the master of all those who have understood journalists, quoted French philoospher Jean-Paul Satre about the role of journalists at that time. This is an excerpt from Sartre:

We were never more free than during the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to talk. Every day we were insulted to our faces and had to takeit in silence.
And by choosing for himself in liberty, he chose the liberty of all. This Republic without institutions, without an army, without police, was something that at each instant every Frenchman had to win and to affirm against Nazism.
.........
No one failed in this duty, and now we are on the threshold of another Republic. May this Republic to be set up in broad daylight preserve the austere virtue of that other Republic of Silence and of Night.

Benim için yazar olmak, insanın içinde gizli ikinci kişiyi, o kişiyi yapan alemi sabırla yıllarca uğraşarak keşfetmesidir: Yazı deyince önce romanlar, şiirler, edebiyat geleneği değil, bir odaya kapanıp, masaya oturup, tek başına kendi içine dönen ve bu sayede kelimelerle bir yeni alem kuran insan gelir gözümün önüne. Bu adam, ya da bu kadın, daktilo kullanabilir, bilgisayarın kolaylıklarından yararlanabilir, ya da benim gibi otuz yıl boyunca dolmakalemle kağıt üzerine, elle yazabilir. Yazdıkça kahve, çay, sigara içebilir. Bazen masasından kalkıp pencereden dışarıya, sokakta oynayan çocuklara, talihliyse ağaçlara ve bir manzaraya, ya da karanlık bir duvara bakabilir. Şiir, oyun ya da benim gibi roman yazabilir. Bütün bu farklılıklar asıl faaliyetten, masaya oturup sabırla kendi içine dönmekten sonra gelir. Yazı yazmak, bu içe dönük bakışı kelimelere geçirmek, insanın kendisinin içinden geçerek yeni bir alemi sabırla, inatla ve mutlulukla (joy) araştırmasıdır. Ben boş sayfaya yavaş yavaş yeni kelimeler ekleyerek masamda oturdukça günler, aylar, yıllar geçtikçe, kendime yeni bir alem kurduğumu, kendi içimdeki bir başka insanı, tıpkı bir köprüyü ya da bir kubbeyi taş taş kuran biri gibi ortaya çıkardığımı hissederdim. Biz yazarların taşları kelimelerdir. Onları elleyerek, birbirleriyle ilişkilerini hissederek, bazen uzaktan bakıp seyrederek, bazen parmaklarımızla ve kalemimizin ucuyla sanki onları okşayarak ve ağırlıklarını tartarak kelimeleri yerleştire yerleştire, yıllarca inatla, sabırla ve umutla yeni dünyalar kurarız.

Orhan Pamuk, his Nobel lecture