Aleksandar Hemon quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Aleksandar Hemon on Wise Famous Quotes.

I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction.

I am just like everybody else ... because there is nobody like me in the whole world.

Politics is about ethics and morality, openly or not openly.

Only once did she say: I love the way you think without thinking,

You have to create a form from the life that exists, not the other way around. If it comes out in these little pieces, that's what it is.

An unjust world represented as harmonious is a political position.

Don't you wonder sometimes," sang Bowie all the way to Kinshasa, "about sound and vision?

There's no bad writing; you did something. I was operating inside language, and I did something. I'm not ashamed of it.

All the lives we could live, all the people we will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is what the world is.

But nothing has ever been - nor will it ever be - the way it used to be.

My skin was the border between the world and me.

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.

Then everyone would retreat for a nap, after which we would have coffee and cake, sometimes an argument.

I cannot think of a country in which I would be happy with the government and dominant ideology and available propaganda.

Washington D.C.! Congress is full of self-declared outsiders.

The balls do not make a writer.

I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.

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 suppose I'm interested in sorrow, which is very different from depression or despair. Sorrow is continuous with the world; it allows for creativity.

Outsider means "I will accept the possibility that I don't have responsibility for what is happening inside my domain."

The liar looks up toward it, hoping against hope that the voices in his head have told him the truth.

Ordering wine in this place was not unlike ordering milk - he was fortunate there were no real (or any) men at the bar to mock his pussiness.

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.

Time does nothing but hand you down shabbier and older things.

Men confide, lust rhetorically, copulate hypothetically with women of unacknowledged fantasy.

I tend to wait for true stories to mature into fiction. Most of my fiction grew out of a long-germinating real-life situation.

I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.

The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.

My country's main exports are stolen cars and sadness.

I believe people are much more complicated than they can handle.

Your memories become fantasies if they are not shared,
and your life in all its triviality becomes a legend.

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.

Death comes and takes you away and there is nothing you can do.

It took me about fifteen minutes to get to the hospital, through traffic that existed in an entirely different space-time.

I'm bright, but there are lots of bright writers and people everywhere. In no way, at no point do I think I'm better than them.

Right now, it didn't look good, the life. What doesn't kill you makes you horny.

What would love be without mutually assured oblivion?

Memoir implies the need to reveal something about yourself - to recount your life for educational purposes.

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'll take any life in which I can make choices and have agency, and America is not a bad place for all that.

In some way there is no real life. It's always the story of your life that you're living.

What is it with boys? How do they slide into fucked-upness so quickly, with such natural ease?

Lord, why did you leave me in these woods?

The more you lose, the more is to be lost, yet it matters less.

People will always tell stories. The publishing industry might vanish, but not stories.

Isabel's indelible absence is now an organ in our bodies whose sole function is a continuous secretion of sorrow.

I deigned to suggest to him that it was also the American thing
America was nothing if not good intentions.

The perfect borscht is what life should be but never is.

There's no connection between consumption of art and moral stamina at all.

What I don't like about America is not necessarily an American thing; it's a capitalist thing. This is the Vatican of capitalism.

Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever.

A good time to be thinking about all that, given that we're just about to tear a new hole in the ass of Iraq.

Where can you go from nowhere, except deeper into nowhere?

It must be taking enormous energy to do her Janet-did-it-again shtick every day; no wonder she was so worn out.

Projecting yourself until everything is talking about you is, of course, a self-flattering form of self-pity

Hi, she said, in a whispery voice, and nodded as if to confirm that she really meant it.

Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.

When I found myself in the U.S., and the war was at full swing in Bosnia, I read for survival - it was a means of thought resuscitation.

At worst, she kept him around so he could make her feel better when she needed it, a winning combination of a pet and a dildo.

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.

I long for, not a writer's retreat - I can write in any situation - but a reader's retreat.

All the players looked absurdly inept, as though they were expressly drafted to be humiliated, entrepreneurs in the industry of losing.

We, as writers, have to figure out a way to create a consciousness in language. It's crazy even to attempt to do that.

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

History: the first time a joke, the second time a badly translated joke.

It was a great fucking time, the short era of disaster euphoria, for nothing enhances pleasures and blocks guilt like a looming cataclysm.

It never ends, Pinya says. Every time, you think maybe this here is a different world, but it's all the same: they live, we die. So here it is again.

She was beautiful; my breath was taken; we were still lonely; she said yes.

Arabs are a complete abstraction in the propaganda world and all the death and destruction is completely unreal to Americans.

I want to change something. I want to stop the germs from attacking my daughters.

Home is where somebody notices your absence.

I had an epiphany: I was a loser.

If you find yourself asking: How did I get here? Isador once said, that probably means you are living a life worth living.

Writing is nothing if not carrying the hopeless, backbreaking burden of decisions devoid of consequences.

If you find yourself as a person in unfamiliar territory, you will grasp on to what is already familiar.

We dreamt of light, but hoped for darkness.

If you wait long enough, something will happen - there has never been a time when nothing happened.

I end up writing something every day, since I develop six or seven things at the same time - soccer columns, this and that.

You don't want your neurosurgeon to have doubts about the meaning of it all while he or she is operating on your brain.

Shiny teeth were footnote to her smile.

To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.

To write has to be related to a drive inside.

Language is so inherent to humanity, so necessary for even basic thinking, that stories and poetry are available to anyone who can process language.

I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.

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.

The detectives ransack the place with the passion of soldiers fighting a just war.

It's so internalized, the way your mind works in relation to anything - it's a process, but then it isn't. It's working all the time.

Tell the fucking story.

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.

Hope sold, of course, and well; it was the corn syrup of existence, fast burning and addictive.

Still, it was fair to say that the minimum requirement for a truly enjoyable existence would be unbridled promiscuity.

Nobody deserves death, yet everybody gets it.

We hated pretentiousness; it was a form of self-hatred.

It was always clear to me that I would have to earn my readers, some I would have to find, some to create.

The world is always greater than your desires; plenty is never enough.

Everything after Star Wars is shit.

If my mind and my city were the same thing then I was losing my mind.

You devise ways to tell a story that complies with your sensibility. Style and method are really extensions of your present sensibility.

Everyone operates within their own domain and obviously those domains overlap to a great extent.

In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there's no word describing that.