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In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction there's no word describing that.

Aleksandar Hemon

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Aleksandar Hemon
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: September 9
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
City of Sarajevo
Describing
Distinction
Fiction
Literature
Word
Bosnian
Bosnians
Nonfiction

More quotes by 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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For a fight to be productive, or at least relevant, writers should fight over different demands they put upon writing (as an individual, private act) and literature (a network of relations in which we are all involved).
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 want to make money, and I would like to have a lot of money, but I still believe that the only reason to write is that somehow it will make something or somebody better.
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 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 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
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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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Washington D.C.! Congress is full of self-declared outsiders.
Aleksandar Hemon
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There is a point in fighting. There is a point in struggle. Not wholesale revolution, maybe, that might not be possible, an absolutely just society, but there are plenty of spaces and places where it's worth putting up a fight.
Aleksandar Hemon
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My books have been published all over Europe. They read me there, and I want to read them back. I also spend a lot of time in Europe, often meeting writers, and I'm sick of apologizing for the embarrassing shortage of translations in America.
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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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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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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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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We apply the language that is comforting and comfortable and familiar in order to grasp that which confuses and scares us. That is the first step toward cliché and stereotype, as they're comforting devices. They reduce the confusing world to the already familiar. We're always smoothing out the bumps of actual living to turn it into narratable life.
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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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
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Everyone operates within their own domain and obviously those domains overlap to a great extent.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Language is so inherent to humanity, so necessary for even basic thinking, that stories and poetry are available to anyone who can process language.
Aleksandar Hemon