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When I found myself in the U.S., and the war was at full swing in Bosnia, I read for survival - it was a means of thought resuscitation.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Aleksandar Hemon
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: September 9
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
City of Sarajevo
Read
War
Means
Resuscitation
Found
Bosnia
Thought
Swing
Mean
Swings
Survival
Full
More quotes by Aleksandar Hemon
What you demand from storytelling is a moral - even political - import. I tend to shun that didactic aspect.
Aleksandar Hemon
I don't believe in inspiration. I write when I can't avoid writing anymore.
Aleksandar Hemon
Lord, why did you leave me in these woods?
Aleksandar Hemon
I want a book to contain a world - indeed the world. Writing is my main means of engagement with the world and I want the scars of that engagement to be left in the language.
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
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
The way I think of my work is that I have to think up the way to tell a story, starting from scratch. The changes in the industry concern me in a general way because I think civilization is doomed.
Aleksandar Hemon
One builds one's life in consistency one invests it with the belief, however unsupported by reality, that one has always been what one is now, that even in one's distant past one could recognize the seed from which this doomed flower has bloomed.
Aleksandar Hemon
Outsider means I will accept the possibility that I don't have responsibility for what is happening inside my domain.
Aleksandar Hemon
If I represent the world as it is as harmonious, that's a political position.
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
Rilke said that art can come only out of inner necessity. I write because I must. Or because I cannot not write.
Aleksandar Hemon
I've read books in school that were written by ideological rote - they were brainwashers. Therefore, any art, any literature, that has a clearly defined political goal is repellent to me.
Aleksandar Hemon
If you have information you've got the world by the balls. But we have to convert information into knowledge in order to make it humanly useful.
Aleksandar Hemon
To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.
Aleksandar Hemon
No reader owes me anything - I am owed nothing for my noble efforts, because my writing was always unconditional, always coming out of inner necessity.
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
I cannot think of a country in which I would be happy with the government and dominant ideology and available propaganda.
Aleksandar Hemon
What I was interested in is the lens organizing my sovereign space. I avoid the term outsider and also exile for the same reason. Outsider implies a kind of nobility.
Aleksandar Hemon
As long as there are living human beings, there will be language and stories.
Aleksandar Hemon
