Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Aleksandar Hemon
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: September 9
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
City of Sarajevo
Space
Walls
Write
Pictures
Else
Piece
Music
Listen
Nothing
Wall
Writing
Return
Every
Pieces
Attaches
Particular
Providing

More quotes by Aleksandar Hemon

Image
I like the idea of a book being a democratic space which readers enter, carrying their own thoughts, and participate in a conversation, or experience of grace.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
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
Image
I wish I could avoid the people who have threatened me. My favorite threat is that I will be thrown in the River Miljacka, which is at most knee-deep, with my feet bound in cement.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
I am just like everybody else...because there is nobody like me in the whole world.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
For people who are displaced, you can reconstruct the story of your life from the objects you have access to, but if you don't have the objects then there are holes in your life. This is why people in Bosnia - if anyone was running back into a burning house it was to salvage photos.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
Even if you tried to extinguish your personality, what is left in the story will reflect it, perhaps by its negation. Our lives provide the bricks from which we build these cathedrals.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
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
Image
The perfect borscht is what life should be but never is.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
The more you lose, the more is to be lost, yet it matters less.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
Anything that might come under arts should not be subject to the whims of the idiotic market because the market's stupid, and it gravitates toward simplicity - towards essentializing things so they can be sold.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
Memory narrativises itself.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
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
Image
The incessant perpetuation of collective fantasies makes people crave the truth and nothing but the truth - reality is the fastest American commodity.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
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
Image
You can see the diversity that pieces in the anthology represent, and then the interconnections-obvious and less obvious-between various stories or between various modes of storytelling. Diversity generates need for conversation, conversation generates common interests, as well as differences. Literature, as a human project, is all about that.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
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
Image
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
Image
What you demand from storytelling is a moral - even political - import. I tend to shun that didactic aspect.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
If you find yourself as a person in unfamiliar territory, you will grasp on to what is already familiar.
Aleksandar Hemon