Aleksandar Hemon Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your memories become fantasies if they are not shared,
and your life in all its triviality becomes a legend.
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.
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.
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.
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.
America was nothing if not good intentions.
What I don't like about America is not necessarily an American thing; it's a capitalist thing. This is the Vatican of capitalism.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Arabs are a complete abstraction in the propaganda world and all the death and destruction is completely unreal to Americans.
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.
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.
To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.
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.
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.
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.
Still, it was fair to say that the minimum requirement for a truly enjoyable existence would be unbridled promiscuity.
It was always clear to me that I would have to earn my readers, some I would have to find, some to create.