Quote

Language is so inherent to humanity, so necessary for even basic thinking, that stories and poetry are available to anyone who can process language.

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
Stories
Basic
Even
Available
Thinking
Necessary
Poetry
Humanity
Anyone
Language
Process
Inherent

More quotes by Aleksandar Hemon

Image
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
Image
Every artist, writers included, have an ethics and an aesthetics, whether they can formulate them or not. I happen to think that it is good to be able to formulate - it is good to know what you are doing and to be able to talk about it.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
Washington D.C.! Congress is full of self-declared outsiders.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
There are studies that have shown that we make decisions, ethical and otherwise, based on the way we imagine ourselves as characters in the stories of our lives. In other words, if we imagine ourselves brave or crazy or open, we're more likely to make decisions in a given situation based on how we imagine ourselves, whatever the facts may be.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
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
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
You have to suspend thinking in narratives. The moment you are conscious of yourself the gap opens up. And in this gap, stories are generated.
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
If I represent the world as it is as harmonious, that's a political position.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
An unjust world represented as harmonious is a political position.
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
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
I long for, not a writer's retreat - I can write in any situation - but a reader's retreat.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
I cannot think of a country in which I would be happy with the government and dominant ideology and available propaganda.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
I think about the story while I think about other things. This is an important part of the process: I look at it sideways. If I look straight at it, it produces nothing other than what seem like complicated, brilliant designs that fall apart the following morning. In some way stories mature when you're not looking.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
The more you lose, the more is to be lost, yet it matters less.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
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
Image
A particular piece of music attaches itself to the piece I'm writing, and there is nothing else I can listen to. Every day I return to the same space to write, the music providing both the walls and the pictures on the walls.
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
Where can you go from nowhere, except deeper into nowhere?
Aleksandar Hemon
Image
Politics imagined as direct agency, whether by voting or by participating in politics, you can think you're not political because you don't do anything between elections.
Aleksandar Hemon