Aleksandar Hemon Quotes
I'll take any life in which I can make choices and have agency, and America is not a bad place for all that.
It is my belief that we as human beings have a need to tell stories - I think it's evolutionary. So you can think of the short story as a literary form, or you can instead think of stories.
I wanted us to share the sense that the number of wrong moves far exceeds the number of good moves, to share the frightening instability of the correct decision, to bond in being confounded.
The mind is complicated and you can't trace the roots of its processes, but there is something about mathematical and algorithmic patterns that I like to recognize in things.
The incessant perpetuation of collective fantasies makes people crave the truth and nothing but the truth - reality is the fastest American commodity.
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.
Projecting yourself until everything is talking about you is, of course, a self-flattering form of self-pity
I end up writing something every day, since I develop six or seven things at the same time - soccer columns, this and that.
Your memories become fantasies if they are not shared, and your life in all its triviality becomes a legend.
Sometimes I don't write at all. Someone once asked me, "What do you do when you're not writing?" And I said, "I idle."
I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction.
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.
In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there's no word describing that.
Even if you tried to extinguish your personality, what is left in the story will reflect it, perhaps by its negation. Our lives provide the bricks from which we build these cathedrals.
Because sometimes you have no control over life and it keeps you far away from who you love.
I wish I could avoid the people who have threatened me. My favorite threat is that I will be thrown in the River Miljacka, which is at most knee-deep, with my feet bound in cement.
I am just like everybody else...because there is nobody like me in the whole world.
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.
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.
I want to make money, and I would like to have a lot of money, but I still believe that the only reason to write is that somehow it will make something or somebody better.
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.
You have to suspend thinking in narratives. The moment you are conscious of yourself the gap opens up. And in this gap, stories are generated.
We, as writers, have to figure out a way to create a consciousness in language. It's crazy even to attempt to do that.
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.
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 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.
Everyone operates within their own domain and obviously those domains overlap to a great extent.
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.
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.
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.
It was always clear to me that I would have to earn my readers, some I would have to find, some to create.
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.
What you demand from storytelling is a moral - even political - import. I tend to shun that didactic aspect.
It's not that war crimes stop as soon as a novel about them is published. Literature operates slowly, it is always inching toward bliss, never quite getting there.
I've read books in school that were written by ideological rote - they were brainwashers. Therefore, any art, any literature, that has a clearly defined political goal is repellent to me.
I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.
Language is so inherent to humanity, so necessary for even basic thinking, that stories and poetry are available to anyone who can process language.
Literature is always something - it is either story or poetry, ideally both. That is, you always know what it is and even if the interpretation is not available, the experience of language is.
