Sasa Stanisic Quotes

#1. Given that the label "immigrant literature" is already established, unavoidable for anyone with a migrant background and used in any given context, I strongly advocate an absurd amount of specification to go along with the label.

Sasa Stanisic

#2. By changing the way I experienced things, even just involving different details than in reality, I often felt I was betraying the past and playing an unfair game with the reader where he (of course) would ask himself "Did this really happen?"

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#3. Instead of giving it [war] a rest I continued pursuing more research, talking to more people on the subject as if I was to please this aftermath of the book by knowledge that was more historical and psychological than literary and aesthetical.

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#4. Something as radical as a war can only be understood (if at all) through the collaboration of journalists, academia, artists and, of course, people.

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#5. It can stand in the way of narration in cases where we want the protagonist to actually go through some kind of catharsis while our own (non-fictional) experiences and stories lead to something banal or completely uninteresting.

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#6. I just feel much more secure about whatever I write if I stand with one foot in reality - meaning if the stories I write about have a core of "this actually (could have) happened."

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#7. The silence leans forward.

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#8. Europe is not becoming more unified - well, yes, on paper - but not as long as the criteria for so many things (import regulations, border control, visa politics ... etc.) are still made in an unjust, unreasonable way.

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#9. Writing about a war will always be political writing, no matter what amount of hermetical hide-and-seek or aesthetical operations are involved.

Sasa Stanisic

#10. A book is not only written - after it's finished it starts writing you, the writer. You become its notebook, its sheet of paper on which it forces you to think and rethink your original ideas, your topics, your research, actually everything.

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#11. I'm against endings. I'm against things being over. Being finished should be stopped! I am Comrade-in-Chief of going on. I support furthermore and etcetera!

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#12. The French always make our sort happy because, like us, they know how to love, they're just as good at playing the accordion, and they've made a real art of their inability to bake proper bread.

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#13. Someone ought to invent a tool, a kind of plane to shave the lies away from stories and deception away from memories. I'm a collector of shavings.

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#14. There's not enough of anything to go around except people and death.

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#15. Missing someone, they say, is self-centered.
I self-center you more than ever.

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#16. If only I were a magician who could make things possible. I'd give objects the gift of defiance: banisters, gramaphones, guns, the napes of necks, braided hair.

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#17. The reason for writing that essay was less a personal agenda than an attempt to explain my unease with the general label of "immigrant literature" after I had read quite a number of reviews (in different countries) involving books written by 'immigrants.'

Sasa Stanisic