Quote

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

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
Deep
River
Feet
Knees
Wish
Thrown
People
Bounds
Favorite
Cement
Avoid
Knee
Rivers
Threatened
Threat
Bound

More quotes by Aleksandar Hemon

Image
Whatever solidarity I have established with other writers individually, it is usually organized around books. We connected as readers, as it were, not writers.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
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
Image
I think it's interesting, from a creative point of view, to have witnessed the loss of consciousness on a national level and on a cultural level - Bush had 91 percent support in the polls after 9/11. We wanted to kick some ass!
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
There are moments in life when it is all turned inside out--what is real becomes unreal, what is unreal becomes tangible, and all your levelheaded efforts to keep a tight ontological control are rendered silly and indulgent.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
The funny thing is that in Bosnia there are no words that are equivalent to fiction and nonfiction. From the storytelling point of view, the difference is artificial.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
I spotted a can in the corner whose red label read SADNESS. Was there so much of it they could can it and sell it? A bolt of pain went through my intestines before I realized that it was not SADNESS but SARDINES.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
What I don't like about America is not necessarily an American thing it's a capitalist thing. This is the Vatican of capitalism.
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
There's no bad writing you did something. I was operating inside language, and I did something. I'm not ashamed of it.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
Chicago has very few public spaces where people are encouraged to get together. It's partly to prevent riots, and also to segregate a city with a history of racial segregation.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The people who listened to rock 'n' roll, I thought, were bound together against the people who didn't listen to rock 'n' roll. That, of course, didn't work at all. Your taste in rock 'n' roll does not say anything about you, morally or otherwise.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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