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The hopeless hope is one of the early harbingers of spring, bespeaking an innocent belief that the world might right its wrongs and reverse its curses simply because the trees are coming into leaf.

Aleksandar Hemon

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Aleksandar Hemon
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: September 9
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
City of Sarajevo
World
Early
Leafs
Coming
Leaf
Tree
Reverse
Simply
Hopeless
Belief
Curse
Harbingers
Hope
Trees
Harbinger
Might
Innocent
Curses
Right
Spring
Wrongs

More quotes by Aleksandar Hemon

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I do have a sense of displacement as constant instability — the uninterrupted existence of everything that I love and care about is not guaranteed at all. I wait for catastrophes.
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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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
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My country's main exports are stolen cars and sadness.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I read everything I could find in English - Twain, Henry James, Hemingway, really everything. And then after a while I started writing shorter pieces in English, and one of them got published in a literary magazine and that's how it got started. After that, graduate school didn't seem very important.
Aleksandar Hemon
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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
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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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Whatever solidarity I have established with other writers individually, it is usually organized around books. We connected as readers, as it were, not writers.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Arabs are a complete abstraction in the propaganda world and all the death and destruction is completely unreal to Americans.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I have a hard time imagining a country or a government where I would say, Oh, this is good, where I could live under a government that I respect for a day or a week, even to see what it feels like.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Time does nothing but hand you down shabbier and older 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
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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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I think about the story while I think about other things. This is an important part of the process: I look at it sideways. If I look straight at it, it produces nothing other than what seem like complicated, brilliant designs that fall apart the following morning. In some way stories mature when you're not looking.
Aleksandar Hemon
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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
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Writing is a mode of agency in the world that is different from mere employment. There has to be some sort of ethical or moral drive, even if you are unaware of it.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I did not intend to stay I had no experience in the United States - I may have been here less than 24 hours - but I knew I would never get inside there. And 'there' not being America necessarily, but that harmonious mode of living that some people are lucky enough to have in this country.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I've never meditated for a moment in my life. I don't know how it works. But one of the things you have to do to put yourself in the meditating mode is stop narrating yourself to yourself.
Aleksandar Hemon
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To write has to be related to a drive inside.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Memoir implies the need to reveal something about yourself - to recount your life for educational purposes.
Aleksandar Hemon