Aleksandar Hemon Quotes & Sayings

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

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. — Aleksandar Hemon

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

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

I read everything I could find in English - Twain, Henry James, Hemingway, really everything. And then after a while I started writing shorter pieces in English, and one of them got published in a literary magazine and that's how it got started. After that, graduate school didn't seem very important. — Aleksandar Hemon

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

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

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. — Aleksandar Hemon

Man reaches a point in his life when unchanging becomes a matter of pride; the habits and remnants of youth are thereafter kept in the museum of the self. — Aleksandar Hemon

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

To him, in whose throat the bone of displacement was forever stuck, it was wrong to talk about nothing when there was a perpetual shortage of words for all the horrible things that happened in the world. It was better to be silent than to say what didn't matter. One had to protect from the onslaught of wasted words the silent place deep inside oneself, where all the pieces could be arranged in a logical manner, where the opponents abided by the rules, where even if you ran out of possibilities there might be a way to turn defeat into victory. — Aleksandar Hemon

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

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

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

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. — Aleksandar Hemon

Hence Joshua giggled to himself: life appeared to him exactly like the joint burning inexorably toward his fingertips - once it's smoked it cannot be unsmoked. — Aleksandar Hemon

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

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. — Aleksandar Hemon

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

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

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. — Aleksandar Hemon

New York is the Hollywood of the publishing industry, complete with stars, starlets, suicidal publishers/producers, intrigues, and a lot of money. — Aleksandar Hemon

I loved you because there was no other place for me to go. We were married because we did not know what else to do with each other. You never knew me, nothing about me, what died inside me, what lived invisibly. — Aleksandar Hemon

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

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. — Aleksandar Hemon

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. — Aleksandar Hemon

George W. Bush spoke to the camera, his face so decisively earnest that it was clear he was lying, his button eyes lit up with amateurish subterfuge. Only truly great men can be adept at shameless lying, Joshua thought. This dude was straining to the point of snapping. — Aleksandar Hemon

There's a psychological mechanism, I've come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence, with all the attendant fear and humiliation of absolute helplessness, it would be very hard to live. It would be unbearably obvious that death is inscribed in everything that constitutes life, that any moment of your existence may be only a breath away from being the last. We would be continuously devastated by the magnitude of that inescapable fact. Still, as we mature into our mortality, we begin to gingerly dip our horror-tingling toes into the void, hoping that our mind will somehow ease itself into dying, that God or some other soothing opiate will remain available as we venture into the darkness of non-being. — Aleksandar Hemon

When I came to America, I was already a writer, already published in Bosnia. I was planning to go back, but I had no choice but to stay here after the civil war, so I enrolled at Northwestern in a master's program and studied American literature. — Aleksandar Hemon

One person's garbage is another person's commodity. — Aleksandar Hemon

The implicit requirements of the committed relationship Joshua was pursuing with Kimiko assumed spending Saturday nights together for the purposes of intimacy. — Aleksandar Hemon

I will never know you, nothing about you, what has died inside you, what has lived invisibly. I am elsewhere now. — Aleksandar Hemon

The trouble with calling a book a novel, well, it's not like I'm writing the same book all the time, but there is a continuity of my interests, so when I start writing a book, if I call it 'a novel,' it separates it from other books. — Aleksandar Hemon

Only gay bars were full; the heterosexual joints were empty - the heteros massively committed to watching television with their falsely monogamous spouses. — Aleksandar Hemon

He who recollects a thing by which he was once pleased desires to possess it in the same circumstances as when he first was pleased by it. He who was never pleased is doomed to an eternal hard-on. — Aleksandar Hemon

One of the most despicable religious fallacies is that suffering is ennobling, that it is a step on the path to some kind of enlightenment or salvation. — Aleksandar Hemon

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. — Aleksandar Hemon

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. — Aleksandar Hemon

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. — Aleksandar Hemon

You are always working on your worst book and your best book at the same time. The praise does not make you write better, and it shouldn't make you write worse, either. — Aleksandar Hemon

What you see is what you see, but that is never everything. Sarajavo is Sarajevo whatever you see or don't see. America is America. The past and future exist without you. And what you don't know about me is still my life. What I don't know about you is still your life. Nothing at all depends on you seeing it or not seeing it. I mean, who are you? You don't have to see or know everything. — Aleksandar Hemon

This is all based on a true story, gentlemen. Hollywood big shots lined up all the way to the Hills to have a diet soda with me, but I wasn't gonna let them fuck me! No, sir!" Graham flashed his middle finger to the erstwhile line of big shots. "Feel free to fuck yourselves, you bunch of Weinsteins! — Aleksandar Hemon

I really don't feel that any of the pieces I wrote were confessions; there are no revelations about secrets in my life, and actually I have nothing to confess and I certainly do not ask for redemption and there is no reward for confessing that I expect. — Aleksandar Hemon

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

My dreams were but a means of forgetting, they were the branches tied to the galloping horses of our days, the emptying of the garbage so that tomorrow - assuming there would be a tomorrow - could be filled up with new life. You die, you forget, you wake up knew. — Aleksandar Hemon

Every artist, writers included, have an ethics and an aesthetics, whether they can formulate them or not. I happen to think that it is good to be able to formulate - it is good to know what you are doing and to be able to talk about it. — Aleksandar Hemon

When the mind imagines its own lack of power, it is saddened by it. — Aleksandar Hemon

The writer does not dare dream of giving the best of his individuality. No, he must never express his anger. The vacillating demands of mediocrity must be satisfied. Amuse the people, be their clown, give them platitudes about which they can laugh, shadows of truth which they can hold as truths. — Aleksandar Hemon

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

-the apartment had been directly in the sight line of a Serb sniper across the river. Teta-Jozefina was a devout Catholic, but she somehow managed to believe in essential human goodness, despite all the abundant evidence to the contrary surrounding her. She felt that the sniper was essentially a good man because during the siege, she said, he had often shot over her and her husband's heads to warn them that he was watching and that they shouldn't move so carelessly in their own apartment. — Aleksandar Hemon

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. — Aleksandar Hemon

I had an epiphany: I was a loser. — Aleksandar Hemon

I think it's interesting, from a creative point of view, to have witnessed the loss of consciousness on a national level and on a cultural level - Bush had 91 percent support in the polls after 9/11. We wanted to kick some ass! — Aleksandar Hemon

I spotted a can in the corner whose red label read SADNESS. Was there so much of it they could can it and sell it? A bolt of pain went through my intestines before I realized that it was not SADNESS but SARDINES. — Aleksandar Hemon

There are studies that have shown that we make decisions, ethical and otherwise, based on the way we imagine ourselves as characters in the stories of our lives. In other words, if we imagine ourselves brave or crazy or open, we're more likely to make decisions in a given situation based on how we imagine ourselves, whatever the facts may be. — Aleksandar Hemon

Politics imagined as direct agency, whether by voting or by participating in politics, you can think you're not political because you don't do anything between elections. — Aleksandar Hemon

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

Writing is a mode of agency in the world that is different from mere employment. There has to be some sort of ethical or moral drive, even if you are unaware of it. — Aleksandar Hemon

There are many things I think about that never get to the point of becoming serious. In other words, I try to talk myself out of writing, sometimes for many years, and when I run out of arguments, I write. — Aleksandar Hemon

Everything after Star Wars is shit. — Aleksandar Hemon

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. — Aleksandar Hemon

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. — Aleksandar Hemon

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

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. — Aleksandar Hemon

Before the war, the domain of culture seemed to offer a haven from the increasingly hateful world of politics. Now, when I hear the word culture, I pull out the quote commonly attributed to Hermann Goring: When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver. — Aleksandar Hemon

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. — Aleksandar Hemon

There's a social and human necessity for some kind of continuity, but it's not axiomatic and not something you're born into; it's something you have to work at. And one of the ways to work at it - perhaps the best - is storytelling: telling stories about yourself to others, telling stories about yourself to yourself, telling stories about others to others. — Aleksandar Hemon

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. — Aleksandar Hemon

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. — Aleksandar Hemon

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. — Aleksandar Hemon

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. — Aleksandar Hemon

I did not intend to stay; I had no experience in the United States - I may have been here less than 24 hours - but I knew I would never get inside there. And 'there' not being America necessarily, but that harmonious mode of living that some people are lucky enough to have in this country. — Aleksandar Hemon

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. — Aleksandar Hemon

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

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

The people who listened to rock 'n' roll, I thought, were bound together against the people who didn't listen to rock 'n' roll. That, of course, didn't work at all. Your taste in rock 'n' roll does not say anything about you, morally or otherwise. — Aleksandar Hemon

Nobody deserves death, yet everybody gets it. — Aleksandar Hemon

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

I don't believe in inspiration. I write when I can't avoid writing anymore. — Aleksandar Hemon

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

A particular piece of music attaches itself to the piece I'm writing, and there is nothing else I can listen to. Every day I return to the same space to write, the music providing both the walls and the pictures on the walls. — Aleksandar Hemon

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. — Aleksandar Hemon

Because sometimes you have no control over life and it keeps you far away from who you love. — Aleksandar Hemon

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. — Aleksandar Hemon

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

There are people who just live and there are people who just survive," Bega had said. "Americans live, we survive. — Aleksandar Hemon

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

I like to blow up this notion that all we have to do as writers and artists is represent reality, which is presumably solid and self-evident, with no negotiation of the gap between myself and the world, between this body and this space, which needs narration to close it. — Aleksandar Hemon

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

He acquired the unknowable, variable depths; he could be anyone he wanted to be, and if he didn't like who he became, he could switch again, going in, going out. And who the fuck are you? — Aleksandar Hemon

People here snarl and frown a lot, he wrote; he had seen neither a smile nor the sun in months. What is life without beauty, love, and justice? — Aleksandar Hemon

An unjust world represented as harmonious is a political position. — Aleksandar Hemon

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

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

I think it is about life. I think there is always more life than death. Those who lived are always alive for someone. Those who are alive remember life, not death. And when you are dead nothing happens. Death is nothing. — Aleksandar Hemon

While he wanted to teach me what he knew, I wanted him to see what it all looked like for me - perhaps love is a process of finding a common vision of reality. — Aleksandar Hemon

Afternoon at the Coffee Shoppe slipped into evening just as Joshua's caffeination reached the heights of the Rwandan plantations where his beverage originated. — Aleksandar Hemon

He drunkenly recognized that the lust was part of something bigger, of a craving to pursue pleasure unreasonably, beyond the right and wrong, to go as far as his body took him. In the body there is no absolute, or free, will, but the body is determined to desire this or that by a cause that is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so on to infinity. — Aleksandar Hemon

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

And the world around me was nothing if not an infinity of distractions: cute girls, novels and comic books, my budding record collection, neighborhood boys whistling from the playground under my window, beckoning me to a soccer game. — Aleksandar Hemon