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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
Literature
Word
Bosnian
Bosnians
Nonfiction
Describing
Distinction
Fiction
More quotes by Aleksandar Hemon
In some way there is no real life. It's always the story of your life that you're living.
Aleksandar Hemon
When I was young, I was all about personal sovereignty and that junk, because there was no privacy and the available ideologies were collective, both socialism/communism and nationalism.
Aleksandar Hemon
I'm not nervous if I think about something for nine years and then I don't write it. Even if it fades it doesn't concern me. It'll come back if it's worth it.
Aleksandar Hemon
Projecting yourself until everything is talking about you is, of course, a self-flattering form of self-pity
Aleksandar Hemon
Lord, why did you leave me in these woods?
Aleksandar Hemon
When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.
Aleksandar Hemon
Time does nothing but hand you down shabbier and older things.
Aleksandar Hemon
Memoir implies the need to reveal something about yourself - to recount your life for educational purposes.
Aleksandar Hemon
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
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
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
I have been on the margins in terms of having to find a place to live and getting a job, but at some point, and before that point, I always thought no matter where I am, that's the center.
Aleksandar Hemon
What you demand from storytelling is a moral - even political - import. I tend to shun that didactic aspect.
Aleksandar Hemon
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
I don't believe in inspiration. I write when I can't avoid writing anymore.
Aleksandar Hemon
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
My skin was the border between the world and me.
Aleksandar Hemon
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
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
I'll take any life in which I can make choices and have agency, and America is not a bad place for all that.
Aleksandar Hemon