Aleksandar Hemon Quotes
When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.
I am itching to criticize some well-regarded writers' works, but I am not doing it because I am perfectly aware that my critique could easily be reduced to envy or just plain meanness.
I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.
I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.
You don't want your neurosurgeon to have doubts about the meaning of it all while he or she is operating on your brain.
If you can't go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world-indeed, nowhere is the world.
We knew - but didn't want to know - what was going to happen, the sky descending upon our heads like the shadow of a falling piano in a cartoon.
Our daughter was born in Chicago, and she's already showing it. The temperature has to be approaching zero for her to wear a hat.
I like to blur the line between fact and fiction, but not to condescend to the reader by enmeshing her/him into some sort of a postmodern coop.
New York is the Hollywood of the publishing industry, complete with stars, starlets, suicidal publishers/producers, intrigues, and a lot of money.
Memoir implies the need to reveal something about yourself - to recount your life for educational purposes.
I've never meditated for a moment in my life. I don't know how it works. But one of the things you have to do to put yourself in the meditating mode is stop narrating yourself to yourself.
It seemed that we loved each other better when there were large swaths of two continents between us. The daily work of love was often hard to perform at home.
The hopeless hope is one of the early harbingers of spring, bespeaking an innocent belief that the world might right its wrongs and reverse its curses simply because the trees are coming into leaf.
Whatever solidarity I have established with other writers individually, it is usually organized around books. We connected as readers, as it were, not writers.
I do have a sense of displacement as constant instability — the uninterrupted existence of everything that I love and care about is not guaranteed at all. I wait for catastrophes.
I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer.
Arabs are a complete abstraction in the propaganda world and all the death and destruction is completely unreal to Americans.
The funny thing is that in Bosnia there are no words that are equivalent to fiction and nonfiction. From the storytelling point of view, the difference is artificial.
I like the idea of a book being a democratic space which readers enter, carrying their own thoughts, and participate in a conversation, or experience of grace.
All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.
I've been a Nick Cave fan since the early '80s when he was part of The Birthday Party thing singing Australian self-destructive rock band and I've always followed his work and loved it.
No reader owes me anything - I am owed nothing for my noble efforts, because my writing was always unconditional, always coming out of inner necessity.
To me, the solidarity of readers is far more important than the solidarity of writers, particularly since readers in fact find ways to connect over a book or books, whatever they may be.
Chicago has very few public spaces where people are encouraged to get together. It's partly to prevent riots, and also to segregate a city with a history of racial segregation.
I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don't want to limit myself.
It was always clear to me that I would have to earn my readers, some I would have to find, some to create.
In some way there is no real life. It's always the story of your life that you're living.
If you find yourself as a person in unfamiliar territory, you will grasp on to what is already familiar.
I do believe - and I know I shouldn't - that art transcends money and success and any of that. You can still do it if you're not clinging to the notion of nobility.
Everyone operates within their own domain and obviously those domains overlap to a great extent.
Wherever there's capitalism there's this inclination toward simplicity. There's also a human need to process complicated things by turning them into something else.
What I don't like about America is not necessarily an American thing; it's a capitalist thing. This is the Vatican of capitalism.
I cannot think of a country in which I would be happy with the government and dominant ideology and available propaganda.
What fiction and art can do, particularly narrative art, is construct consciousness - in a sense, we have to do it for the first time, every time.
What I was interested in is the lens organizing my sovereign space. I avoid the term outsider and also exile for the same reason. Outsider implies a kind of nobility.
I have been on the margins in terms of having to find a place to live and getting a job, but at some point, and before that point, I always thought no matter where I am, that's the center.
Despite all that I know rationally, and everything that I can put into words, I can say that I have difficulty giving up the notion of the nobility of art.
I hate traveling and being away from my family. But I like meeting my readers, as what I write is actualized in them. Those encounters are exhilarating to me.
