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I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer.

Aleksandar Hemon

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Aleksandar Hemon
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: September 9
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
City of Sarajevo
Novelists
Calls
Writer
Novel
Novelist
Someone
Implies
Kind
Superiority
Resist
Inherent

More quotes by 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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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
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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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It's difficult for me to understand how it was possible to live under the Bush regime for eight years and then just roll over and do other things.
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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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
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I don't think that everyone should have a philosophical answer to any given question. There are things that need to be done.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I hate traveling and being away from my family. But I like meeting my readers, as what I write is actualized in them. Those encounters are exhilarating to me.
Aleksandar Hemon
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You devise ways to tell a story that complies with your sensibility. Style and method are really extensions of your present sensibility.
Aleksandar Hemon
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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
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Literature is always something - it is either story or poetry, ideally both. That is, you always know what it is and even if the interpretation is not available, the experience of language is.
Aleksandar Hemon
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The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.
Aleksandar Hemon
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My country's main exports are stolen cars and sadness.
Aleksandar Hemon
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It was always clear to me that I would have to earn my readers, some I would have to find, some to create.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Because sometimes you have no control over life and it keeps you far away from who you love.
Aleksandar Hemon
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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
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Europe is a rapidly changing place, on every level. Immigration, post-communist transitions, the unification, steady presence of war and conflict, the inescapable challenges to the notion of national literature/culture-it all exerts pressure upon writers who must be aware of the transformational possibilities of the situation.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever.
Aleksandar Hemon
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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
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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