Sasa Stanisic Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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.

Sasa Stanisic

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

Sasa Stanisic

#5. My demon is you. My best and worst is about you: how I need you and fear for you, how I fear for myself if I lose you, how I have let myself be defined by you.

Danielle Younge-Ullman

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

Sasa Stanisic

#7. 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.

Sasa Stanisic

#8. 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.

Sasa Stanisic

#9. what Graham called "quotational" values

Benjamin Graham

#10. 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!

Sasa Stanisic

#11. Aptitude starts with attitude.

Greg Norman

#12. 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.

Sasa Stanisic

#13. The thing about startups is you can make it, and if it's wrong you can remake it, and you can build a team that you want to have, a product that you want to have. You're utterly focused on your users or your customers and their needs, and trying to figure out how to meet those needs.

John Katzman

#14. When I was a kid, I liked the newer music that was coming out. I have never really felt confined by any style of music. I would play in bands that were soul bands or that played standards - any kind of music that I enjoyed playing.

Tommy Shaw

#15. It's not about what the equipment does, it's about what you can do through that equipment. That's where the soul is.

Richie Hawtin

#16. 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.

Sasa Stanisic

#17. The silence leans forward.

Sasa Stanisic

#18. Whenever I begin reading a new book, I am embarking on a new, uncharted journey with an unmarked destination. I never know where a particular book will take me, toward what other books I will be led.

Nancy Pearl

#19. 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."

Sasa Stanisic

#20. I never can understand why people take the time to leave a negative review on a book or piece of artwork. There are other ways for you to find outlets in the world.

K.L. Adams

#21. 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.

Sasa Stanisic

#22. Most actors really love it, that's what they want to do. They burn to do it. And so they'll read a script and think, that's an interesting part. And because they love acting, that blinds them to the fact that the rest of it is pretentious nonsense, which it very often is.

Hugh Grant

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

Sasa Stanisic

#24. 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.

Sasa Stanisic

#25. 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?"

Sasa Stanisic

#26. I'm fairly certain I'm having my first truly religious experience, and it's probably a very bad thing that it's happening in a church, but it's over a sculpture. Mental note: Add idol worship to your list for confession.

Lisa Desrochers

#27. 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