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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

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Aleksandar Hemon
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: September 9
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
City of Sarajevo
Often
Swaths
Two
Continents
Home
Perform
Better
Daily
Hard
Seemed
Work
Distance
Love
Large
Loved

More quotes by Aleksandar Hemon

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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.
Aleksandar Hemon
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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
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New York is the Hollywood of the publishing industry, complete with stars, starlets, suicidal publishers/producers, intrigues, and a lot of money.
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An unjust world represented as harmonious is a political position.
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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
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People will always tell stories. The publishing industry might vanish, but not stories.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Washington D.C.! Congress is full of self-declared outsiders.
Aleksandar Hemon
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To write has to be related to a drive inside.
Aleksandar Hemon
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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
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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
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God knows our despair. God wants His chosen people to live in peace. God loves life, cares less about death. We need to live. I want to live, I want my children to live. Everyone I know wants to live. You have to ask yourself what is more important to you, life is death. What is this world about - life or death?
Aleksandar Hemon
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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
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Memory narrativises itself.
Aleksandar Hemon
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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
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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.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I tend to wait for true stories to mature into fiction. Most of my fiction grew out of a long-germinating real-life situation.
Aleksandar Hemon
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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
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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
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In some way there is no real life. It's always the story of your life that you're living.
Aleksandar Hemon