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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

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Aleksandar Hemon
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: September 9
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
City of Sarajevo
Literature
Story
Language
Experience
Ideally
Stories
Interpretation
Even
Available
Something
Poetry
Always
Either

More quotes by 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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The incessant perpetuation of collective fantasies makes people crave the truth and nothing but the truth - reality is the fastest American commodity.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I've never meditated for a moment in my life. I don't know how it works. But one of the things you have to do to put yourself in the meditating mode is stop narrating yourself to yourself.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I am itching to criticize some well-regarded writers' works, but I am not doing it because I am perfectly aware that my critique could easily be reduced to envy or just plain meanness.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I like to blow up this notion that all we have to do as writers and artists is represent reality, which is presumably solid and self-evident, with no negotiation of the gap between myself and the world, between this body and this space, which needs narration to close it.
Aleksandar Hemon
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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
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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
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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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If you find yourself as a person in unfamiliar territory, you will grasp on to what is already familiar.
Aleksandar Hemon
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There is a logic [to my reading], but I can't define it. I like reading impulsively. I collect books, I have a lot of them, but most of them I have not read yet. I'll read them when they call me from the shelf.
Aleksandar Hemon
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The more you lose, the more is to be lost, yet it matters less.
Aleksandar Hemon
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All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Your memories become fantasies if they are not shared, and your life in all its triviality becomes a legend.
Aleksandar Hemon
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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
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If you can't go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world-indeed, nowhere is the world.
Aleksandar Hemon
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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
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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
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Cliché activates the comfortable mental laziness, we sort of revert to the domain of the already-familiar, what we have already imagined so that it doesn't seem that bad.
Aleksandar Hemon
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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