Quote

I long for, not a writer's retreat - I can write in any situation - but a reader's retreat.

Aleksandar Hemon

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Aleksandar Hemon
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: September 9
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
City of Sarajevo
Long
Retreat
Reader
Writer
Situation
Write
Writing

More quotes by Aleksandar Hemon

Image
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
Image
My skin was the border between the world and me.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
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
Image
If I represent the world as it is as harmonious, that's a political position.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
There's no connection between consumption of art and moral stamina at all.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
I have a hard time imagining a country or a government where I would say, Oh, this is good, where I could live under a government that I respect for a day or a week, even to see what it feels like.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
I cannot stand that whole game of confession, that is: Here I have sinned, now I'm confessing my sins, and describing my path of sin and then in the act of confession I beg for your forgiveness and redemption.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
The more you lose, the more is to be lost, yet it matters less.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
Projecting yourself until everything is talking about you is, of course, a self-flattering form of self-pity
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
We knew - but didn't want to know - what was going to happen, the sky descending upon our heads like the shadow of a falling piano in a cartoon.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
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
Image
What you demand from storytelling is a moral - even political - import. I tend to shun that didactic aspect.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
Politics is about ethics and morality, openly or not openly.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
If you find yourself as a person in unfamiliar territory, you will grasp on to what is already familiar.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
Memoir implies the need to reveal something about yourself - to recount your life for educational purposes.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
It's not that war crimes stop as soon as a novel about them is published. Literature operates slowly, it is always inching toward bliss, never quite getting there.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
I believe people are much more complicated than they can handle.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
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
Image
I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
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