Until he was 21, Orhan Pamuk wanted to become a painter. Thereafter, he turned to the art of “painting with words”: he became a novelist. In his six Norton lectures the Nobel laureate reflects on writing and reading fiction. THE NAÏVE AND THE SENTIMENTAL NOVELIST (Harvard Univ., $22.95) is a distinction drawn by Schiller; some writers proceed spontaneously, seemingly without forethought, others work with self-conscious attention to craft and effect. Pamuk believes all novelists are a bit of both types, as their work also appeals to both the visual and the verbal imaginations. While the writer’s search for le mot juste is famous, Pamuk concentrates on the need for l’image juste. Novels work by accretion of details, each of which is visualized by the writer and then the reader as if seen from the characters’ points of view. Novels also have a knack for giving us a world at once unique and familiar--that’s one reason we read them. Another is to find the elusive “center” where all the details merge into a coherent meaning. We search for such a center in life; we’re more apt to find it in a literary novel, such as one of Pamuk’s, or the one he considers “the greatest novel of all time,” Anna Karenina.