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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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Aleksandar Hemon
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: September 9
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
City of Sarajevo
Situation
Waiting
True
Stories
Mature
Real
Tend
Long
Wait
Life
Fiction
Grew
More quotes by Aleksandar Hemon
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
I recognized him then that is, I finally comprehended what I had known but had never been able to formulate: he had always been complete. He had finished the work of becoming himself, long before any of us could even imagine such a feat was possible.
Aleksandar Hemon
I suppose I'm interested in sorrow, which is very different from depression or despair. Sorrow is continuous with the world it allows for creativity.
Aleksandar Hemon
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
Time does nothing but hand you down shabbier and older things.
Aleksandar Hemon
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
Our daughter was born in Chicago, and she's already showing it. The temperature has to be approaching zero for her to wear a hat.
Aleksandar Hemon
Arabs are a complete abstraction in the propaganda world and all the death and destruction is completely unreal to Americans.
Aleksandar Hemon
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
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
Rilke said that art can come only out of inner necessity. I write because I must. Or because I cannot not write.
Aleksandar Hemon
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
Your memories become fantasies if they are not shared, and your life in all its triviality becomes a legend.
Aleksandar Hemon
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
The world is always greater than your desires plenty is never enough.
Aleksandar Hemon
I am just like everybody else...because there is nobody like me in the whole world.
Aleksandar Hemon
You devise ways to tell a story that complies with your sensibility. Style and method are really extensions of your present sensibility.
Aleksandar Hemon
Sometimes I don't write at all. Someone once asked me, What do you do when you're not writing? And I said, I idle.
Aleksandar Hemon
Cliché activates the comfortable mental laziness, we sort of revert to the domain of the already-familiar, what we have already imagined so that it doesn't seem that bad.
Aleksandar Hemon
All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.
Aleksandar Hemon