Top 100 Aleksandar Hemon Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Outsider means "I will accept the possibility that I don't have responsibility for what is happening inside my domain."
Aleksandar Hemon
#3. 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
#4. The way I think of my work is that I have to think up the way to tell a story, starting from scratch. The changes in the industry concern me in a general way because I think civilization is doomed.
Aleksandar Hemon
#5. 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
#7. 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
#8. It took me about fifteen minutes to get to the hospital, through traffic that existed in an entirely different space-time.
Aleksandar Hemon
#9. The end of the world might be near, Isador said to her once, but we don't have to rush to reach it.
Aleksandar Hemon
#10. It seemed that we loved each other better when there were large swaths of two continents between us. The daily work of love was often hard to perform at home.
Aleksandar Hemon
#11. Politics is about ethics and morality, openly or not openly.
Aleksandar Hemon
#12. The liar looks up toward it, hoping against hope that the voices in his head have told him the truth.
Aleksandar Hemon
#13. If someone imagines that someone loves him, and does not believe he has given any cause for it, he should love in return.
Aleksandar Hemon
#14. Only once did she say: I love the way you think without thinking,
Aleksandar Hemon
#15. I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.
Aleksandar Hemon
#16. I long for, not a writer's retreat - I can write in any situation - but a reader's retreat.
Aleksandar Hemon
#17. Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.
Aleksandar Hemon
#18. 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
#19. Arabs are a complete abstraction in the propaganda world and all the death and destruction is completely unreal to Americans.
Aleksandar Hemon
#20. 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
#21. Joshua needed to eat something before embarking upon it, and hence stood in line behind an overtattooed prick who couldn't decide between banana and pumpkin bread, while the barista in a Che Guevara hat (yet presumably fluent in Middle fucking English) looked on indifferently.
Aleksandar Hemon
#23. When we're upset, our vocal cords tighten and we can't speak. And when I lie - well, I can't lie, because the same thing happens - everyone who knows me knows that when I start squeaking, I've started lying.
Aleksandar Hemon
#24. You don't want your neurosurgeon to have doubts about the meaning of it all while he or she is operating on your brain.
Aleksandar Hemon
#25. 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
#26. To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.
Aleksandar Hemon
#27. The world is always greater than your desires; plenty is never enough.
Aleksandar Hemon
#28. I want a book to contain a world - indeed the world. Writing is my main means of engagement with the world and I want the scars of that engagement to be left in the language.
Aleksandar Hemon
#29. 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
#30. I've been a Nick Cave fan since the early '80s when he was part of The Birthday Party thing singing Australian self-destructive rock band and I've always followed his work and loved it.
Aleksandar Hemon
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. I know a lot of people in the city, at all levels, horizontally and vertically - and that to me is a privilege, to me as a person but also a writer. I've dined with billionaires, and I play soccer with busboys.
Aleksandar Hemon
#34. 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
#35. When I was young, I was all about personal sovereignty and that junk, because there was no privacy and the available ideologies were collective, both socialism/communism and nationalism.
Aleksandar Hemon
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Because sometimes you have no control over life and it keeps you far away from who you love.
Aleksandar Hemon
#39. One builds one's life in consistency; one invests it with the belief, however unsupported by reality, that one has always been what one is now, that even in one's distant past one could recognize the seed from which this doomed flower has bloomed.
Aleksandar Hemon
#40. 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
#41. 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.
Aleksandar Hemon
#42. It felt like lying, only better, because he couldn't be caught, and he couldn't be caught because there was nothing to verify it against. Immersed in the flow of bullshit, they had no reason, or time, not to believe him.
Aleksandar Hemon
#43. I never thought of myself as an outsider. Because outside of what? You would have to give advantage to this space where you're not, to think of it as sovereign because you're not there. I was always in the center of where I needed to be.
Aleksandar Hemon
#44. 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
#45. It's difficult for me to understand how it was possible to live under the Bush regime for eight years and then just roll over and do other things.
Aleksandar Hemon
#46. The detectives ransack the place with the passion of soldiers fighting a just war.
Aleksandar Hemon
#47. I deigned to suggest to him that it was also the American thing
America was nothing if not good intentions.
Aleksandar Hemon
#48. I started appreciating and valuing different things. Some things just became insufferable to me, and not just literature. I used to like horror movies and now I couldn't stand them.
Aleksandar Hemon
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. Writing is nothing if not carrying the hopeless, backbreaking burden of decisions devoid of consequences.
Aleksandar Hemon
#52. There is a point in fighting. There is a point in struggle. Not wholesale revolution, maybe, that might not be possible, an absolutely just society, but there are plenty of spaces and places where it's worth putting up a fight.
Aleksandar Hemon
#53. I don't believe in inspiration. I write when I can't avoid writing anymore.
Aleksandar Hemon
#54. I end up writing something every day, since I develop six or seven things at the same time - soccer columns, this and that.
Aleksandar Hemon
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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.
Aleksandar Hemon
#58. There is a logic [to my reading], but I can't define it. I like reading impulsively. I collect books, I have a lot of them, but most of them I have not read yet. I'll read them when they call me from the shelf.
Aleksandar Hemon
#60. 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
#61. Right now, it didn't look good, the life. What doesn't kill you makes you horny.
Aleksandar Hemon
#62. 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.
Aleksandar Hemon
#63. 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
#64. There are moments in life when it is all turned inside out
what is real becomes unreal, what is unreal becomes tangible, and all your levelheaded efforts to keep a tight ontological control are rendered silly and indulgent.
Aleksandar Hemon
#65. In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there's no word describing that.
Aleksandar Hemon
#67. I have two homes, like someone who leaves their hometown and/or parents and then establishes a life elsewhere. They might say that they're going home when they return to see old friends or parents, but then they go home as well when they go to where they live now. Sarajevo is home, Chicago is home.
Aleksandar Hemon
#68. Men confide, lust rhetorically, copulate hypothetically with women of unacknowledged fantasy.
Aleksandar Hemon
#69. If I represent the world as it is as harmonious, that's a political position.
Aleksandar Hemon
#70. 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
#71. The sad fact of life was that there were no cruising spots for heterosexual men. If there were, Joshua would be parked somewhere every day of his life, willing to sleep with any woman generous enough to pull up alongside him.
Aleksandar Hemon
#72. 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
#73. The implicit requirements of the committed relationship Joshua was pursuing with Kimiko assumed spending Saturday nights together for the purposes of intimacy.
Aleksandar Hemon
#74. Memoir implies the need to reveal something about yourself - to recount your life for educational purposes.
Aleksandar Hemon
#75. 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
#77. If you find yourself as a person in unfamiliar territory, you will grasp on to what is already familiar.
Aleksandar Hemon
#78. I take picture because i like to look at the pictures I take.
It seems to me that when people take a picture of something, they instantly forget about it.
They can look at the picture and remind themselves.
Aleksandar Hemon
#79. We know that laws ought to be obeyed only if they come out of people's sense of justice, not because the state needs them to preserve its power. Laws devised for the depravity of power are as worthless as the paper they are printed on.
Aleksandar Hemon
#80. Chicago is not a bad place to live. But the usual story of immigration is the happy fulfillment of human potential in America that is not available anywhere else - it's propaganda, really. It's more complicated than that.
Aleksandar Hemon
#81. Rilke said that art can come only out of inner necessity. I write because I must. Or because I cannot not write.
Aleksandar Hemon
#82. An unjust world represented as harmonious is a political position.
Aleksandar Hemon
#83. 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.
Aleksandar Hemon
#84. As long as there are living human beings, there will be language and stories.
Aleksandar Hemon
#85. The privilege of a middle-class, stable, bourgeois life is that you can pretend that you are not complicated and project yourself as a solid, uncomplicated person, with refined life goals and achievements.
Aleksandar Hemon
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. History: the first time a joke, the second time a badly translated joke.
Aleksandar Hemon
#91. I'm a dilettante by temperament. I don't have any expectation.
Aleksandar Hemon
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. One of the many conditions that have to be met for a brain to become a mind, and therefore have consciousness, is 'the analog I' around which all the simultaneous inflow of sensations and stimulations are reflected and organized.
Aleksandar Hemon
#97. 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
#98. What I don't like about America is not necessarily an American thing; it's a capitalist thing. This is the Vatican of capitalism.
Aleksandar Hemon
#99. Your memories become fantasies if they are not shared,
and your life in all its triviality becomes a legend.
Aleksandar Hemon
#100. 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
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